image 101 A wayback machine recreation of my personal website from 1998.
So, with the cliff jump taken, we have webpages in the late 90s. Part of the motivation back in 1997 was to look at new ideas to fill the hole left from the loss of a BBS in my life. Recently mom had setup an account with a local internet service provider (ISP), the Davis Community Network (DCN), to have internet access in the house that wasn’t through an old UCD account. This would give her a proper email address and access beyond kids just downloading pirated files and looking up dirty USENET groups. A side effect was that it gave me some proper server space that was paid for and in theory couldn’t be messed without fear. I started making pages at a ridiculous uniform resource locator (URL), http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~mscldy/ryan , yup nice and simple to remember. I made a main index, listed some likes, and then expanded on those in subfolders.
At the time I was since I was getting back into Star Wars, I made the afore mention page. It was an Episode 1 rumor page. Then of course there was the Xena, Warrior Princess page, mainly focusing on the episodes and supporting cast. It helped that Chris M. was into Bruce Campbell’s character on the show and while he was still around giving him some interest in what I was doing.
The Xena page then took off. It may have helped that by this time, between figuring out stuff with ANSI for design purposes and years of Photoshop, my page just looked nicer than most other offerings out there. It may have also helped that I was migrating away from being at school and would go through and answer all my emails at the time, which expanded into email groups and so on. So, people coming to my site had a lot more instant communication. It was like being the SysOp of a BBS, if you talked to everyone they kept coming back.
As time went on, I would use the main index of my personal site to just list other sites and some images of other interests. Once I figured out how to capture real audio, I was able to setup links to silly things Marty and I found funny at the time, like the Levi’s commercial of some Asian dude going through a carwash with the windows down. We linked the man to Hien and added to the page. Then I just keep seeing how far I could push the Xena fan page ideas, to keep the visits coming. Then on January 20th, 1998, after watching a new show called Dawson’s Creek, I decided I should start up a page for the character Katie Holmes played on the show while there were none. I don’t know I just had a spark that people wanted more from that show and character, and being that I had the site up a few hours after the series premiered, I had a good spot in line.
And thus for a few years an entertainment empire was born. Overnight the amount of traffic coming into that long URL, into a subfolder, called I think joey (as in that long URL/joey/), was more traffic than my mother was allowed on DCN. This was when I learned how much of a new frontier web hosting was and that almost no one providing web space in that era ever allotted for the sites having actual web traffic. ISP’s would offer the space, but if you generated any traffic they’d lose their minds and shut down whatever they could since most ISPs where cheap, dial up based, and couldn’t handle hosting sites that required actual bandwidth.
Luckily as this happened with DCN, I got an email from another web site prospector that had just registered a website for the actress of the character and had his own space. He offered a 50/50 split on the site if I moved it over. I took him up on it. When moving the site over I noticed some part of his information was attached to a UCD email address, and so not only did I get lucky with finding a new hosting site, but this random guy wanting to get in on what I had just tapped, happened to live about a mile or so down the main Boulevard from the L street house. The random chance of that is crazy. Now if I didn’t met him and see he was actually into the show I could have justified it all as he saw the DCN address and just took an opportunity since he had a web server, but he did seem to genuinely be into the actress and the show.
image 102 Not the first design, but one of the earlier designs for the Katie Homes website, which started as Trouz's Site of Joey. By this time the site had switched to focus more on Katie Holmes than her character on the show.
Then things became obvious, it wasn’t picking the shows you liked and being a fan that generated big traffic, it was picking the celebrities then glorifying the characters they played that were becoming popular. The Star Wars site would meld into a Natalie Portman site, and traffic would increase enough to get, what at the time, were ad banner contracts. Nowhere near today’s advertising dollars though. So, I sold my fan sites souls to celebrity sites for money, and I was fine with it. Now with more resources at our disposal we added Message Forums, much akin to what the old BBSs had and now the websites felt like lucrative BBSs with, better graphics. The next big addition was being able to do video capturing since I went out and got a capture device which was rare at the time.
Video Capturing became a staple and huge draw of the site. Every week people could get still images and short video clips from the newest episodes of Dawson’s Creek and other shows now associated with other “starlets” that the site had started to work with. This in an era where a lot of the shows coming up were getting featured with an “official” website that was mainly just a one-page advertisement of when the show was on and that season’s five or so official still images.
The Capture card also allowed us to save talk show appearances, which would have entirely come and gone without rerun through the late show circuits if not saving them forever to the internet. Real Audio, JPEGs, and small AVI movie clips helped the sites generate even more traffic to match with the Message Boards. And then even more complaints up the chain of command from the people supplying the bandwidth. The world was starting to shift to the internet, but the providers weren’t equipped for the demand that was coming. This made managing the web domains a lot of daily work.
To work around the limitations of “unlimited” internet in the late 90s a lot of our sites were hosted on one server while the images and other large bandwidth items were scattered over an intricate web of free servers. While those sites had their limitations, one popular image gallery using the free space of say a GeoCities folder wasn’t going to make anyone mad. As long as there was some fake index file for the free accounts you could stash any manner of files in the folder and not get kicked out of the server. If I recall, I even used some of the free sites to host the main index pages of the real sites further blurring the line of what was going on.
Of course, in today’s internet the numbers we were hitting should have never caused so much of a ruckus, but the expectation back then was pretty low from the ISP and web providers, so matters had to be taken.
But the main fun of doing this, beyond money, was the message forums. The Katie Holmes forums initially were the most active by a country mile and they ran with a community feeling much like the old local BBS forums as I said, except no one was local. This caused moderation of the boards to become a bigger issue because people had personal anonymity from trolling. In the old days you pissed the wrong person off you got locked out of all the BBSs and had to look the people in the eye that forced you to sit at home with nothing. Now you could get banned and just make a new account.
So, we had to institute a way to block IP numbers from registering accounts. The fights then would be different when people got mad because the punishments now in the new day and age were less severe and harder to maintain. With that, lets re-introduce Marty who is doing his weekdays at the Police Academy and his weekends at the L street house, posting on the new forums.
Now I mentioned Duncan, and when Marty got ousted by that group of local computer kids, then later he was still engaging in chat and forum drama with the kids, but now I have given him access to the world. Look I am going to speculate here, so Marty may deny this, but having a Message board with access to anyone that had internet back then, which meant kids our age, and having the site’s operator in the room with him, gave him a sense of power. And he liked power when entering in a “debate” or as some would call it a flame war.
Enter our first major event with Marty I can remember. Marty was actually a fan of the show Dawson’s Creek, he wasn’t just posting to starch that itch he missed from his BBS days, but he definitely wasn’t into the show like some of the cats in the early days when the site was still called Trouz’s Site of Joey. I don’t remember everyone he butted heads with over this, but there was an antagonist to his protagonist, if you want to look at things that way. A guy whose nickname on the boards was Gog. Gog was a resident of Wilmington, North Carolina, which happened to be where the show, Dawson’s Creek was filmed.
He was in his early twenties like most of the avid posters in the forums were and so had taken to getting up in the morning and getting in line to be an extra on the show itself. This provided the site in its early days a lot of access to information and the like other fan run sites didn’t. This brough him his own little celebrity within the group of diehard fans. For reasons or another that I don’t remember he and Marty didn’t care much for the others opinion on things.
Now I have to give mainly what I remember from Marty side because, he was in my bedroom posting and I knew a lot of mindsets he was ranting about. Anyway, Marty decided at some point he was sick of the mindless devotion some of the geeks on the forums had for Katie Holmes, in particular those one could tell couldn’t distinguish the actress from the on-screen character Joey. He wasn’t wrong, in these early days a lot of the creepier fans were more bold with their undying love for something, figuring now one could know who they were.
Gog became sort of the catalyst for the pro creeper group. Marty would start to attack Gog as using his geographical location to garner false idolism and that it blinded him from seeing that the show and actress weren’t all that important. This, as things do, quickly degenerated into personal attacks, some of which were obnoxious because we had to deal with it on the server side of things. So, Marty decided he was going to mess with the whole lot of mindless fans and came up with the James Vander Beek arrest report.
Marty took all his current policing knowledge and carefully one night constructed a fake police report inditing that someone on the set that was a minor had possibly been involved with Vander Beek and that the police were investigating if a crime had been committed. He then took the time to sharpie over any reference to address or the minors name in the reports to add to its fake authenticity. Then made a new account and posted the information as though he were some anonymous informant letting the internet know the storm that was about to come out.
How that would change anything who knows, but it was a prank pulled on the legions of those not capable of having a laugh even when it came out that the information wasn’t real. Marty would grow sick enough of the Katie Holmes groups that he moved to one of the other forums as time went on. There less maliciously he continued to engage in little troll wars. Mainly I remember his complaints about a post named Mulder the Poulter Cow.
The Splitting of groups to different forums was an issue as time went on, even though it expanded the amount of sites and forums that were getting used, it slowed the feverish style of discussion that kept threads going, which mean ad revenue. This is why after a while of adding sites, eventually a group of us working on the content for these multiple sites tried to centralize the websites into one main hub. Thanks to the WayBack Machine it looks like that happened on December 18th, 1999, with the launch of a site called http://www.hotrage.com/ . In some respects, this was the sign of a downturn for my income. While Hotrage would expand what we were doing there were more people involved now and less revenue to share.
image 103 a Wayback machine backup of HotRage.com from August 2000, some thumbnails missing.
It was around this time other endeavors, through people met doing the websites, became dependent on the websites they were “brainstorming”, becoming huge, so that people could be “paid” later. You know pay people with imaginary later money. Couple this with my need to move to San Diego in 2000, I would step back heavily from what was going on. Now decades later we know what was coming, the signs were there, the avenues that were paying where getting cornered and gobbled up. Those places that were trying not to, well guess how those were about to go, wonder how everything burst.
This wasn’t the end of things though. Some of the sites maintained popularity after I moved away. And while in San Diego later on during a time of fiscal crisis, I recalled that the young man in Davis whom I started the first positive website with still owed me a clutch of money. Obviously with the payment being so delayed I couldn’t get through on the telephone, which cost money back then just to make the call anyway. So, I got to volunteers, Jim and Karl to go collect for me and put it out of my mind.
Later that day I got a call from the young man, it wasn’t an apology for being so far behind on payments. Nope, it was, “Please don’t send your goons after me.” Anyone that knows Karl, might find him as a goon somewhat hilarious. Anyway, he said I could have just asked for it, I told him I had tried and that I couldn’t physically collect it since I was 500 miles away and it’s not like wire transfers or anything were a thing at this time. Finally, to appease him I sent, I think my mother to go collect the back owed money. Which I am pretty sure he undercut, should have sent Jim and Karl again to break his legs I guess.