Keep Calm and Carry On

Years ago, we found ourselves running one of the most popular social networks in the UK, the Keep Calm-o-Matic. Odds are, if you were a British teenager around that time, you knew it or were on it.

The story of how we got there is an unusual one. Back in 2009, Andrew was spending too much time on b3ta, and built a simple “Keep Calm and Carry on” image generator. The idea was simple: put some words into a webpage, and out would come your own official-looking poster. You could choose colours, add a background, and put a logo on it. He put some options on so that you could get your design printed – on a t-shirt, a mug, or so on. Earlier this year we closed the site, and Andrew wrote a short piece on the blog about its closure.

Between the Keep Calm-o-Matic and awdit, there was a period in the 2010s we were running two sites doing seriously big traffic simultaneously. Each of them needed more than a 100Mb connection to cope with the traffic, even with a CDN. Good times.