Site History

When a website goes through many iterations, it becomes necessary at some point to discuss those iterations. We'll discuss them now.

This website started a long time ago when I found myself ranting at a particular coworker and he just didn't give a fuck what I was saying. My response? Make a website. It was his advice (Todd, the coworker, rather than the Todd who is a good friend of mine). So that's exactly what I did. It was 2001 and I had a dial-up account with EarthLink. So I put together what I had and played with it...

The next iteration was to move it from the earthlink server to my own, and get a dynamic dns host for it. I don't even remember what it was, other than it was benedict.something.net. I ran a basic wiki program for it, and I updated it surprisingly often. I think it may have been benedict.serves-eggs.com as a play on Eggs Benedict (a breakfast dish that I particularly enjoy).

So there it sat, for awhile. I ran different software on it (not a lot of different packages, mind you) until I finally decided to register a domain, and that domain has stayed in place ever since then. This would have been about 2003. So I finally had a www.davefancella.com, and I had a website there! Holy crap!

I spent a lot of time resisting calling it a blog because, well, I didn't log everything I did on the web, so it can't be a weblog, right? I just wrote what I thought about from time to time, taking the time to plan out the article before I wrote it. So I wrote articles, not blog entries! Really, that's how I thought. Then I moved the whole thing over to a CMS package that I wrote all by my lonesome. It was actually the time when I most loved my website....until now. But at that time, it was the best website I'd ever had.

I had my 15 minutes of fame with the Windows vs Linux article, made some ad money, and then watched everything die.

Then, it was while I had that website that I scored a few freelance writing gigs and ultimately a contract job for an open source company that supported the family for 2 years.

Then I switched it out for a Drupal-powered website and wrote a lot of crap. Just plain garbage. Under pressure from the former in-laws, I removed the garbage, did a database dump, and went to a different sort of website.

That's when I wrote my gensite script (that I've gotten emails about, but it is no longer available because it, too, is garbage). I wrote a python script that generated a website based on txt2tags files. I trimmed the article count, but didn't write any new articles.

In fact, I never wrote any new articles after that point. The website was dead. I went through a divorce and only made minor edits to reflect that. I moved a few times and some of those times I updated the website to reflect the move. I neglected it. It didn't matter to me!

At a certain point, I hit a frame of mind where I realized the ex-wife couldn't stop me from doing what I wanted, and what I wanted was a stick-figure comic that told the jokes I wanted to tell, explored the topics I wanted explored, etc. So I made that, but I didn't replace my website with it. I put it in its own safe place where it wouldn't hurt my employment options.

And I've worked on it from time to time....

And then we get to now. You're looking at now, now. What happened then already happened.

Over several spurts of comic updates, I reached a point where I realized that the best money I've ever made and the best life I've ever lived came directly from maintaining my website. Directly. There can be no argument here, because facts are facts! And realizing this, and that my comic was the site I wanted to maintain, and considering how ridiculous the idea that I can make a living from a web comic really was, I still decided against all wisdom of any kind, to invest my energy into it. Because, well, it worked before, you know, writing what I wanted when I wanted. It scored me some sweet work.

So I've finally reached the point where my web comic is my website. I have nothing else. This is it. It's not making any money, but that's only a matter of strategy, really, right? I scrounged up the few articles I wanted to keep for posterity (2) and counted the ones I have to rewrite (1) in order to get it back where I really wanted it.

And I finally updated the dns records. www.davefancella.com is comics.davefancella.com. The two are now the same site.

Because I don't need any others.