March 14, 1997 to March 14, 2007
I didn’t realize it at the time, but somewhere in 1995 I created my first Web page. It happened quietly and suddenly. I posted a message to a news group and a service called Deja News copied that message and stored it for posterity in a Web page. Deja News anticipated so many things: Web forums, blogs, social media. Now known as Google Groups, Deja News bridges the past with the present on the Web.
I created my first intentional Web site in August 1996. I called it The Worlds of Michael Martinez and so far as I can determine no version of it remains, not even on the Wayback Machine, Archive.Org. My worlds encompassed the world of music, the world of literature, the world of work — all seen through my eyes, expressed through my words.
After creating three more Web sites (Xena Online Resources, The History of Xena: Warrior Princess, and The Witch World Page) on various ISP services I decided around February 1997 that I should really consolidate my various Web projects on one domain. On March 14, 1997, Xenite.Org sprang to life on the Web, although it took about 3 days for DNS databases around the world to pick up its information.
By the end of March I had created my first Web forum, The Witch World Forum, which was the first Web forum dedicated to Andre Norton. Later that year I created the first Web forum dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien and the Inklings. Through the years I have launched other “first” forums, including the first fan-operated Farscape and Andromeda forums.
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And yet despite my creativity and innovation, I have occasionally dropped the ball. One day in the summer of 1997 I received an email from Tom Simpson. Tom created Xenafan.com, which to this day remains the most popular Xena fan site ever. He wrote to say, “Hey, great to see you have your own domain! But you should put an index page on your root URL to keep people from poking around your directories.”
Oops.
My early Web projects began as news group postings, and it took me several months to stop thinking of Web pages as static versions of news group postings. I was always hampered by a lack of resources. Unlike so many other fan sites I couldn’t provide huge image archives because I didn’t have the hardware to make screen captures from movies and television shows. Nor was I a graphics artist, nor an illustrator, nor even much of a photographer. And I didn’t have a scanner for several years.
One day I received an email from a graphics artist named Stacey Capps. “Great site, Michael, but your graphics are really bad. Would you like some help?” I gratefully accepted her help and have continued to use Stacey’s graphics to this day. We should probably replace them, but I still haven’t learned to do that sort of thing on my own. And call me old-fashioned or Web 1.0, but I really do like the motif.
Dixie Harrison has been with me almost since Xenite.Org started. By April 1997 I was unable to devote the time required to updating Xena Online Resources. I appealed to Xena fans for help and about a dozen of them signed up to become the XOR Team, and our first group of volunteers. There have been many dozens of volunteers who have helped out since. By November 1997 I had to go offline for a while. I had just asked Dixie to take over management of the XOR Team, so having no one else to turn to I emailed her the passwords, explained a few technical procedures, and said, “Please take care of the place while I’m gone.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about managing no domains!” Dixie complained. She drew many deep, heavy breaths as we discussed the transition over the telephone. Well, she got through the experience and went on to become one of the best, most capable Webmasters/mistresses I have ever had the pleasure of working with. And though she does graphical design, too, she tends to be very busy. Quality is always in high demand.
10 Years of Imagination on the Web
Dixie has taken everything I’ve thrown at her and made it work, mostly. My only regret is a server crash I caused about a month after New Zealand actor Kevin Smith died. We lost everything and had no current backups. Thousands of fan tribute messages were literally wiped out in the space of a second of time.
When Xenite joined a promising advertising network that promised lots of money, processing power, and bandwidth, Dixie helped me upgrade 40,000 pages of content, set up new forum software, and make the transition. And she said nothing very harsh or critical as the server crawled to its knees and thousands of people stopped visiting our domain. She stood by quietly when the checks began to arrive, much smaller than anticipated, and lasting only about 3 months. She pitched in to help move the domain off the dysfunctional server that had been temporarily allocated to us and onto a new hosting service.
When I have not had the money to pay the ever-increasing server fees, Dixie has made up the difference. For now, we do earn enough off on-site advertising to pay the bills. But you never know what the future will bring. I’ve tried just about everything to make ends meet. I hate the advertising but it works. What can I say? I’ve turned down “lucrative” advertising deals through the years because they just aren’t lucrative enough. Truth be told, I could probably earn quite a bit more each month if I sold links, but I won’t do that.
Xenite.Org has helped to introduce the science fiction fan community to a lot of Web technologies through the years. We tried Internet Radio (which was great until the service shut down for lack of income), Internet Television (which was okay but the programming selections were not all that great), Xena games, polls, community surfing technology, Java-based chat, and things I can’t even remember clearly. While everyone else was loading their pages with screen captures and collages, I was constantly looking for content no one else had discovered yet.
And we created a lot of our own content: FAQs, essays, tutorials, news stories, feature articles. I’ve learned to take pictures (sort of). I’ve uploaded a few pictures (not great) and I’ve worked hard to find great merchant partners who offer unique merchandise. I only wish I could have done more, but there were long periods where neither I nor Dixie could really spend much time working on the domain.
We moved the forums to their own domain, SF-Fandom, in 2001. I set up SF-Worlds (twice). I finally took my dwindling homepage and moved it to a proper michael-martinez.com domain. I have helped friends launch and promote Web sites. And I have helped thousands of strangers promote their sites as well. We still operate the largest directory of Hercules and Xena-related content, so far as I know.
But through the years many friends have come and gone. All the volunteers who helped us with Xena content, Andromeda content, and other projects have fallen away. We still have a great group of forum moderators, but even some of
10 Years of Great Web Sites
our original mods are no longer with us. Such is life on the Internet. But what seems the saddest thing to me is that when I find archived bookmark files from the 1990s and even just a few years ago, I click on so many links to once great sites and find they are gone.
Who remembers the ghosts of yesterday but we stewards of ancient lore who must one day also take ship and set sail for distant shores?
Xenite.Org is my life’s greatest work, and I shall never achieve its like again, though I may make many attempts to surpass it. A few months ago I looked at some Web tools that estimate the relative position a domain has among all domains. Out of more than 20,000,000 supposedly active domains, Xenite.Org was ranked between 100,000 and 110,000. If those statistics are to be trusted, Xenite.Org is more popular than 99.445% of all Web sites. We’re in the top 1%, almost the top .5%. And according to a very old statistic, Xenite.Org was one of the 1st 1,000,000 Web domains created. I can’t really complain about that. More than 1,000,000 people pass through Xenite.Org each year. I hope they find something of value.
Over the past year, as I have watched this 10th anniversary approach, I have tried to think of special ways to celebrate it. “No one will really notice,” Dixie said to me recently. She is right. We celebrate so many anniversaries, every magazine and television does so, that what is one more anniversary when it’s just for a Web site. When it’s just for the 111,000th or so Web site?
Well, it represents ten years of my life — more than ten years. That means a great deal to me. When all else has gone wrong, Xenite.Org has remained steadfast, enduring the dot-com meltdown, search engine turmoil, and bitter disputes that really should never have occurred. I spent three weeks picking the right domain name (although I probably should have gone with .COM). I spent several weeks working out our slug line, “Worlds of Imagination on the Web”. I spent many long nights learning to write Perl code, dissecting scripts, improvising new interfaces, and creating ugly page designs that were functional, easy to reuse and update, and creating a horde of behind-the-scenes scripts that you know nothing about.
So it’s our 10th anniversary and we’re going to celebrate it. And I have just the thing, although I wish I had more time to finish it. In fact, I’ve had six years to finish it, but through all those years I never found the time.
In April 2001 I asked several people to participate in a project that was going to be called Xenite.Org Today. It was to be a glossy magazine-style Web layout with interviews from actors and television show writers and producers and some very prominent Xena fans who helped make some of my projects both memorable and successful. We had an editor and a Web designer who were going to put the site together. I had the interviews under way. And then the editor and designer both fell out of the project.
There was no way I could do the site myself, and Dixie was still not quite there yet. So I tabled the project. But I’ve managed to hang on to several of the emails through multiple hard drive crashes and changes of computers. So even without the glossy mag-style layout, and despite the fact that the television shows are no longer in production, here is my gift to you, loyal visitors: I present Xenite.Org: The Lost Interviews.
Enjoy.
And thank you all for being here, whether you just found us or have been dropping by for many years, looking for the newest, craziest content. If I could do it all over again, knowing what I know now, it could certainly have been technically better in many ways — but there will always be only one Xenite.Org. And this is it.
–Michael Martinez, founder, Xenite.Org (March 14, 2007)