petanque.org is actually one of the oldest user-driven websites on the internet today. When we started up in 1997 there was no plan, it all started with a group of web-designers and programmers that enjoyed drinking beer at the local pub. However we realized that drinking beer was not a good excuse to leave home at any given time, we needed a better plan. Or just simply a plan.
And fortunately one of us had 12 competition-boules at home and a few years experience at playing petanque. So the club PPP was formed.
The the P's stand for
- Pils
- Pipe ( we where all pipe smokers)
- Petanque
In the summer the first P was often exchanged with another P - Pastis.
From 1999
Hosting was extremely expensive back then, so we bought an old 100Mhz pc, and set the site up on that. There were other technical challenges, for instance you could not download any blog-software, they did not exist back then. So we wrote our own content management system.the Hotboule-script was given to us by the man who made "snohoo", a snooker site. The rest was made by hand, line by line. It took a lot of time..
In the first years we participated in "Copenhagen open", a massive tournament in Denmark with over 150 teams. Due to lack of sleep and the face that danish beer is so nice we lost all matches. But we had a wonderful time. Upon arrival we almost got shot by the guards at the US. embassy, a bomb threat had been sent in, and we pulled up outside in i minibus filled with screaming petanque-players. But we managed to slip away. We slipped down the wrong way, and ended up driving into a police car in a one way street the wrong way, but thats another story.
So every monday we gathered to plan and drink, and plan the website. And play. In norway the winter is pretty rough so we stayed inside when there was more than 50cm of snow.
One advantage of being an early startup it that we got a lot of contributions - people from all over the globe sent us material. They could not post their images on Flickr(it did not exist), upload their videos to youtube (it did not exist) or discuss it in Facebook, twitter, myspace or blogger (they did not exist either). we were the only game in town, so to speak. They could search for petanque on atavista (it is gone), but not on google (it did not exist either!!)
Byron Putman discovered petanque some two years ago and fell in love, head over heels. Then decided to analyze every angle of the game, including its development in the USA. He started clubs in Palm Springs, CA and in Lake Oswego, OR. And wrote a book about it, aptly named "Pétanque - The greatest game you never heard of!"
10 shooters, amongst one woman, were present at the finals of the manifestation 1.000 Boules in Nieuwegein (very near to Utrecht in the centre of the country) on Saturday night, the 29th of October 2011. Amongst the players there was also Philippe Quintais, the former French world champion (12 times!) who gave a demonstration at the end of the manifestation, visited by almost 400 spectators. All players had to shoot 100 boules within 10 minutes at a distance of 8 meters.
Devotees of pétanque will now be able to enjoy a glass of pastis before a match again: The World Anti-Doping Agency is to remove alcohol from its list of prohibited substances for competitions.
At Parkhurst Petanque in Johannesburg, we developed a new game called Petanque Pinball.
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