On March 14, 1997 I officially launched Xenite.Org as a new collective home for four Websites I had established in various places. I built my first Website (“The Worlds of Michael Martinez”) on CompuServe in a special users’ section I think they called Compuserve Places (or maybe that was Compuserve Personal Pages), where we each received 1 million bytes of disk space. At the time that seemed like both a lot of space and not too much. I was so accustomed, as a computer programmer, to thinking in terms of hundreds of bytes (for record lengths) that I didn’t know what I would do with 1 million bytes of space. The Compuserve Web design tool was primitive, hard to work with, poorly designed, and did not even come close to approximating a WYSIWIG interface.
![What Xenite.Org looked like in 1998. The domain was a little over a year old. This screen capture from Archive.Org does not quite get the dimensions right.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/xenite-1998-06.jpg)
When I began working on the original Xenite.Org I didn’t even have a concept in mind. There was no root page. If you had clicked on just the domain name all you would have seen was a directory listing. Tom Simpson, the owner of the massive XenaFan.Com Website, dropped me an email one day and pointed out the missing index page. That was the day I realized there could be so much more to a science fiction Website than just the stuff I had moved there. He ignited a flame that has yet to burn out, although sometimes when I look around the old girl I see that I’ve allowed her to become a little disheveled. I keep meaning to fix all that. I just don’t have time, energy, and inspiration to do so all at once.
To be honest, I started working on new concepts for Xenite.Org in 2016. But real life intervened. My sister-in-law passed away and when I traveled to Florida for her funeral I picked up a cold that led into a long bout of bronchitis. That lasted for months, I got another cold, and yada yada yada. So the big surprise I had planned for Xenite’s visitors is still under wraps. We should unveil a new Xenite.Org later this year. It just won’t be on her birthday. But she’s not going anywhere. Even so, it’s been a long great journey. How many other people can say they have one of the first 1 million Websites (there are now nearly 1 billion) and that it has been continuously operating (with only a few minor disruptions) for 20 years? Not many, I warrant you. Not many at all.
Where the Journey Began
It’s important to me to remember how and why it began. I started circulating a list of Hercules and Xena fan sites on Usenet in mid-1996. I updated the list every two weeks. Later that year Compuserve, trying to compete with AOL (which eventually bought the service), offered its users a miserable 1 megabyte of disk space for Websites. After I spent all night creating “The Worlds of Michael Martinez” I realized this Web thing might catch on. Within days random people began emailing me to compliment me on the page. We boldly pasted our email addresses on our Websites back then. Before the Dark Times. Before the Scrapers.
By December 1996 I had set up a couple more Websites. By February 1997 I knew I wanted my own domain name. I spent three foolish weeks debating over what they could or should be. At the time the standard convention was that you should use .ORG for a personal Website. I could have gotten .COM. I should have gotten it. But I went with .ORG. I can’t complain.
By May the Xena fan sites list had become so large it was a directory that is now memorialized as Xena Online Resources. Well, that was what it has always been called. But the old directory is gone. I recruited fans and friends to help maintain the directory, which eventually accumulated over 2,000 listings. We probably reviewed between 6,000 and 7,000 Websites. At a minimum I would say that Hercules and Xena fans had created about 10,000 fan sites by the year 2000. We could not list them all. Nor could anyone else. Not Yahoo, not Google. We had the largest collection of fan sites and it was a pretty good time.
![Xenite.Org somewhere around 2000. The Circle Weave comic strip was a third-party widget. We launched the original Internet Book List (now discontinued).](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/xenite-2000-06.jpg)
Dixie Harrison joined Xenite.Org in 1997 as part of the XOR Team. She eventually took over management of the directory and within a year had become my full-time partner in Web madness. When I could not be there for Xenite.Org Dixie was. As the years passed and I became involved with other Websites, like the original Suite 101 (not the site you see today), Dixie became involved with her own projects. She took a job at a small university and became their Internet wizard. We drifted apart and by 2010 were only occasionally touching base via phone or email. Nonetheless her passing in 2014 hit me hard and to this day I still occasionally reminisce about the many late nights on the phone, where we wrangled with technical issues that today would seem like nothing to me.
Dixie was the technical genius behind most of Xenite.Org and its sister site, SF-Fandom. She learned more about Web design and graphics design than I have yet learned. She dove into all the software projects we needed in those early years and made things work even though I was the professional programmer in my daily life. But when you cut code all day long you kind of don’t want to look at it when you get home in the evenings. I enjoyed reading and writing essays, emails, and looking for cool new sites.
How Xenite.Org Became What It Is Today
The Website you see is very different from the site that was once here. It’s more mature and robust in some ways, but also a bit leaner. At one time we had 50,000 pages of content: forum discussions, fan fiction, directory pages, essays, site news articles, and so much more. When I was interviewed on a large west coast radio station in 2001 the DJs were blown away by the idea that a website could have 50,000 pages of content. Of course, today it’s common for sites to have millions of pages. 50,000 is nothing to brag about any more, except that we had that much content before most people had Websites.
![Xenite.Org as it looked in 2005. The missing banner at the top promoted our GEICO Tiny House tribute article.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/xenite-2005-12.jpg)
After moving the forums to SF-Fandom we began redesigning Xenite.Org and some of the old content was retired for one reason or another. By 2011 we were down to about 20,000 pages of content. They were mostly auto generated pages created by RSS scripts that grabbed interesting news headlines every day and published them in a massive entertainment news index. It became the most popular part of Xenite.Org but maintaining it was a nightmare. The sites whose headlines we published (to which we sent a lot of traffic) kept changing their RSS feeds, perhaps in a misguided attempt to prevent people like us from sharing their stories and sending them visitors.
We had a custom (bespoke) Content Management System that Dixie and I had written. It worked very well and we could publish content just about anywhere. But it was primitive compared to the software you could download off the Web. I always meant to update it, make it more powerful, but I kept putting off the task. And by then I had gotten some experience with WordPress and Blogger, and Dixie had set up blogs for us on other sites using B2Evolution. I was kind of depressed by the idea of trying to replicate all the stuff you could do with blog software.
Google gave me a reason to change everything in 2011. They released an algorithm, dubbed Panda after an engineer whose work had been critical to its design, that attempted to separate good websites from low quality websites. Xenite.Org, once the pristine flagship of Science Fiction Fandom (well, one corner of it), was downgraded by the Panda algorithm. We only lost about 20% of our traffic because, at the time, most of our traffic did not come from Google. Google dropped its referrals to Xenite by almost half. In my day job I was working with Websites that had lost up to 80% of their traffic. My boss offered me a great raise if I could figure out how to recover from Panda quickly. Well, I figured out how to do it but the cure was so radical no one was willing to do it.
No one but me.
In 2011 I Wiped Out Xenite.Org
![Xenite.Org in April 2011. There was a colorful masthead at the top of the page that Archive.Org did not save.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/xenite-2011-04.jpg)
In May, after pondering my lost traffic for a couple of weeks, I realized that all those auto generated pages of news headlines were the problem. The scripts had been broken by yet another change in RSS formats and we had hundreds, perhaps thousands of archived pages filled with broken links, no links, and just junk. I was surprised people kept coming back to the site. I guess they were hoping we would fix things.
I spent a long night working on scripts to pull RSS feeds, fixed around 100 of them, and then realized sadly that this wasn’t going to be the end. It was only a matter of time before something else would break again. And I think I realized then that one of the reasons why Dixie and I had drifted apart was that I had taken the fun out of doing Xenite.Org projects. I never had time for anything again. If I saw a need for a new section I just cannibalized some script and began auto generating new pages. There was no reason for us to collaborate late into the night on new stuff. All our old volunteers had long since drifted off to other projects in separate corners of their lives. Xenite.Org had become a hollow shell of fannish activity. It was essentially a zombie Website.
The fastest way to rid myself of the burden of all that future work was to just wipe the site clean. So that is what I did. POOF! It took less than 10 seconds. Sure, I kept backup copies (and backups of the backups) out of paranoia. But I was for all intents and purposes done with Xenite.Org. I had other Websites I cared about, including SF-Fandom. And I no longer had a problem with Google. There was nothing left for Google’s algorithms to object to.
While I did feel a sense of loss and finality, I left the domain alone. I still needed the server so a 1-page Xenite.Org explained to everyone that the old Xenite was gone forever. And then about a month later I was ready to try again.
Xenite.Org Was Reborn in June 2011
After years of promising myself I would rewrite the old Xenite CMS I decided instead to install WordPress. I had become disenchanted with B2Evolution and wanted to try something else. To be honest, I did a poor job of it. I had no real idea of what to do with the new Xenite.Org.
But somewhere along the way I realized I could make a better fan site for J.R.R. Tolkien fans than I had ever been involved with. Xenite had the very first LoTR movie news site (launched in 1998). We broke the story about Peter Jackson signing with Newline Cinema. Yada yada yada. But I didn’t want to build another news site. I wanted to create something more personal, something that represented me. Truth be told I should have done that on Michael-Martinez.com but I wanted to bring back Xenite.Org. I guess I had to prove to myself I could build a big, popular Website again.
I harvested what I thought was worth saving from the backups and randomly restored about 100 articles to Xenite. But I had too little experience with WordPress and blogging to understand what I was doing. The CMS wouldn’t allow me to do what I wanted to do with the content, or to organize it the way I wanted to. It was like trying to fit a square mountain into a round sinkhole. And that was just with 100 pages of content.
![The Middle-earth Blog at Xenite.Org in March 2017. The WordPress theme is somewhat dated but we cannot find one that works as well.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/middle-earth-blog.jpg)
So I decided to create that Tolkien fan site on a subdomain, which many of you now know as The Middle-earth Blog. It was WordPress’ ability to publish many sites on subdomains that would save my sanity, and in a way make this site more interesting. We had a few subdomains already. But setting up subdomains manually and uploading content to them via FTP is a tedious process. It’s boring. WordPress gave me the chance to launch a new Website at my leisure without much planning. Over the past six years I have converted most of the old subdomains to be WordPress sites.
The content on www.xenite.org is still pretty interesting but most of it is old, going back in some cases to the 1990s. People still visit the site and read those old archives, but they no longer attract the attention they once did. Part of my renovation plan is to move that content to new subdomains later this year. That will allow me to do something different with www.xenite.org. I’ll be able to spend more time adding content to the root host than I have been for the past five or six years.
Now that I know how to use WordPress far better than I did in 2011 I can wipe away the old mistakes and start over. I just have to find the time and energy to go with the inspiration. And there are other changes coming. We need a server upgrade desperately. It was supposed to be done by now but that bronchitis forced me to push back a lot of project deadlines. When the new server is in place Xenite.Org, SF-Fandom, and their sister sites should become faster for our visitors. They’ll be able to handle more connections. We will be able to experiment with new ideas just like in the old days. Hopefully that new server will be online in a few more weeks.
What You Will Find on Xenite.Org Today
None of these sites will be going away. When we need to update them, redesign them, or whatever we should be able to do that without losing anything. But some of these sites are already being upgraded. We began working on those sites last year.
THE MIDDLE-EARTH BLOG – This is without question the premier section on Xenite.Org in 2017. Tolkien was always an important part of the domain, but 20 years ago we were more about Xena than Middle-earth. That is, after all, where we got the name Xenite from (not Star Trek, as people used to ask). One of the great things about the Middle-earth blog is that it has an endlessly growing queue of fan questions. I have published almost 900 articles there since launching the site in 2011. Over 600 of those articles are in the Tolkien Questions and Answers section. But don’t ignore these other great sections:
Archive of Suite101 Articles – I wrote about Tolkien and Middle-earth for the old Suite101 Website from 1998 to 2001. These were the essays that thousands of people followed every week, and which probably brought me the most recognition for my research into Tolkien’s fiction. All of the essays are republished here. In fact, they are no longer available on Suite101.
Feature Articles – Every now and then I have a reason to write about something other than the interesting questions that fans ask. You’ll find my movie reviews, some humor pieces, and other special articles here.
Interviews with the Scholars – What an incredible project this was. Officially it is not complete. I would love to interview more Tolkien scholars. But it became obvious to me when I was working on the last published interview, with John Garth, that I just didn’t have time to do the project justice any more. These are some of the best interviews I have ever published, and my only regret is that I could not do more before I ran out of time.
Middle-earth Journals – These are sort of news announcements for when various online journals were published. Unfortunately the journal publishers struggled to get their projects finished and I eventually gave up trying to follow their publications. Gamers will nonetheless be interested in this archive of articles. While I cannot promise that any of the links still work, you’ll at least have some titles to search for.
Middle-earth Talk Radio – My friend Hawke Robinson and I have, unfortunately, not been able to record many of these episodes. There are about fifty. This is the archive of the announcements I wrote for them when they were released. I don’t know if the download links still work. Hawke was at one point uploading the audio recordings to YouTube, I think. All of the videocasts are available on YouTube now. I’ll have to update this section later with some better links.
Middle-earth Unplugged – This is experimental fan fiction. I don’t often write fan fiction. It has always irked me that some reviewer said of my Mindfaring Through Middle-earth Kindle ebook that it is fan fiction (it’s not). The Middle-earth Unplugged essays are written in what I call the National Geographic style. If you have ever read the National Geographic magazine you’ll understand what I mean. Each of the Unplugged articles has pictures that represent some of my own personal vision (interpretations) of Middle-earth. I suppose the most popular of these essays was the article titled “Horror in the Woods – How Men Live in Mirkwood”. Francesco Nepitello, lead designer for The One Ring roleplaying game, told me he felt it agreed with much of his own interpretation. I took that as the highest possible complement.
Middle-earth News – Did I say I didn’t want to write more Tolkien news articles? Well, people occasionally seek me out to help spread the word about the projects. And I enjoyed the trip to Denny’s headquarters a few years ago. But most of these articles are very old, from the original Lord of the Rings movie news site. People just keep looking for them, so I republish old articles from time to time when I see “page not found” errors in the server logs. Who knew?
Tolkien Questions and Answers – I cannot keep up with the demand for articles in this section. If I only had more time … Seriously, I have about 50 unanswered questions sitting in a queue right now. I usually receive more questions when I publish a new article. Writing these articles is especially fun for me because they are wonderful excuses for doing research into history and other subjects that may help explain some of the curious things about Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Of course, the curse of writing so many articles that answer fan questions is that whenever I attend a science fiction convention they don’t allow me to participate in any Tolkien trivia contests.
![Xenite.Org Network News as the page looks when the headlines are fully rendered.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/xenite-network-news-150x150.jpg)
XENITE.ORG NETWORK NEWS – What is the Xenite.Org Network? Well, it’s a lot of Websites. Techically, you’ll only find a small selection of them represented on this site. In the old days whenever we launched or updated a new site or section we published a small news article (written in journalistic style). It was actually a very popular section on Xenite.Org. But I don’t have time for that any more. Sorry. 🙁
This site populates pages with RSS feeds from our various WordPress sites. If the feeds have not been cached within the past hour the pages will take a few seconds to grab the feeds and load. So if you see a blank page, don’t panic. It’s just grabbing the latest headlines for you.
There are three pages. The “home” page carries all the news headlines. If you are familiar with POPURLs or AllTop then you’ll recognize the format immediately. On desktop computers hold the cursor over a headline and you’ll see a balloon appear with a brief excerpt from the article. I don’t remember what this looks like on a smart phone.
The “Xenite.Org Network Twitter Accounts” page is populated by widgets from our Twitter accounts. You will have to disable any ad blocker or privacy plugins in your browser to see the widgets, but we don’t run ads on that page. And the third page just links you to other sites that have similar news headline sections. This small site is entirely automated. I don’t think we’ll return to the journalistic news format but if we do this is probably where we’ll publish network announcements.
![The SEO Theorist blog in March 2017. I don't update it as much as I used to.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/seo-thoerist-150x150.jpg)
THE SEO THEORIST BLOG – Well, if you know what I do professionally, then you know I write the SEO Theory blog. But that site started out as the property of a company I used to work for. When I knew I would be leaving that company in 2010 I started this blog to be my personal SEO blog. And then the old employer agreed to let me have SEO Theory for free. So I ended up with two SEO blogs. You know, I just kind of go with it.
That company had two other blogs, VisInsights and Best SEO Blog, that they allowed to fall into disuse and eventual oblivion. Miles Ward (formerly of Amazon and presently of Google) and Blake Cahill (currently at Royal Phillips) launched VisInsights and invited me to share blogging responsibilities with them. The Best SEO Blog was supposed to be written by my team but blogging was not in their blood. I eventually wrote most of the articles for the blog. I republished many of my old articles from VisInsights and Best SEO Blog on the SEO Theorist. I think they are still very relevant today.
![Xena Online Resources in March 2017. It's hard to get a good screen capture of this site. There are many listings and you can even search for images.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/xena-online-resources-150x150.jpg)
XENA ONLINE RESOURCES – This is not the Web directory that once was. I had to archive the directory. Dixie was the one who maintained it and after she was gone it just broke my heart to think of changing anything she had worked on. So I set up a Google Custom Search Engine to index all the major Xena fan sites. I don’t know if I can ever do anything like XOR again. I’m sorry. I hope you understand.
One of the things that working on the original Xena Online Resources document taught me was that no mistake is worth agonizing over. I published an updated list every two weeks and I always found broken links. Although I fixed them in later issues, I saw that people were tolerant of mistakes. As an SEO theorist I have learned to take a long-term point of view. People agonize over the smallest mistakes but, really, there is nothing that 10 years won’t fix for you on the Internet.
As a directory operator I also learned that a lot of people don’t really know what to do with a Website. We did our best to encourage people to express themselves. You don’t have to be a professional anything to create a site you love. Just add something to it and keep going.
![The official Xenite.Org site search tool in March 2017. WordPress does not have a widget to search multisites, so you have to do something like this.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/xenite-site-search-150x150.jpg)
SEARCH XENITE.ORG – This is a site search tool powered by Bing. Actually, it is Bing loaded into a frame. A long time ago, on a Web far, far away, Microsoft (Bing) offered a really great site search tool. It actually helped you earn more traffic from the Bing search engine itself. That was important because people were always afraid that Google would become their only source of traffic. And then Microsoft decide to “improve” their site search tool by doing away with the old technology and substituting a terrible new widget.
Well, I decided I wanted real Bing search on Xenite, so I figured out how to frame it. Sorry this looks like crap. What can you expect from Microsoft? They don’t seem to care about building more traffic to their search engine through site search. Nonetheless, this site search tool works as fast as Bing (because it IS Bing) and it does a much better job than, say, the Google Custom Search Engine (which sucks).
The reason why there is a “Xenite.Org site search” at all, as the image caption says, is that you have to use an external tool to index all your subdomains, especially on a blog managed by WordPress. I have always been frustrated by that limitation because all the blogs are stored in the same database. So the site search section is not some glib fun experiment. It really is the only way you can search all of Xenite.Org (from Xenite.Org itself).
![The Huckleberry Wild Website in March 2017.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/huckleberry-wild-150x150.jpg)
HUCKLEBERRY WILD – Oh my GAWD! I love huckleberries! The Vulcans have a saying: “Only Michael Martinez would build a fan Website for fruit.” Okay, I suspect there are other fruit fans out there (keep your jokes to yourselves) but this is one of the more popular sections of Xenite.Org. You can learn all about huckleberries and huckleberry products here. You may even see some ads. Huckleberries are like blueberries on steroids, and they are healthier for you than blueberries (and blueberries are like one of the super magic healthy fruits). Just stop laughing and learn to love huckleberries. Those damn bears know what I’m talking about.
There is a serious side to Huckleberry Wild, as well. It was one of my first dedicated “affiliate” Websites. For a few years it made more money than any other part of Xenite.Org. I’m not sure why interest in huckleberries has dropped off. Perhaps the Great Recession affected the gourmet foods sector more than I realized.
![The SciFi Movies Portal is one of our older sections and it needs to be updated (a little too) often.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/scifi-movies-portal-150x150.jpg)
SCIENCE FICTION MOVIES PORTAL – You know what the problem with developing a Website about science fiction movies is? There are just so damn many of them! This site has a lot of articles but it’s never finished and it seems like the secondary menus are always breaking. I need to redesign the site badly but it does cover a lot of the movies that I love to watch.
When I launched this site as a static HTML subdomain it was my intention to add a lot more content. But keeping up with movies is a full time job, or nearly so. People want reviews, and inside secrets, and videos, and pictures. We have done what we could with this site but it will never be one of the major film portals. It is, however, a fan’s (mostly) non-commercial take on science fiction movies.
What I hate most about the commercial entertainment Web is that it seems to have killed off the old school fan sites. Sure, there are plenty of Tumblrs but frankly I want more than an endless spew of animated GIFs.
![The Compuserve IMPs were, to my knowledge, the first successful online writers group (of previously unpublished authors).](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/compuserve-imps-150x150.jpg)
COMPUSERVE IMPS – The Imps are one of the oldest online writing groups on the Internet. They were founded back in 1990 or 1991, I think, by wannabe writers waiting IMPatiently for admission to the old SciFi Lit forum’s workshop (which was taught by professional SF writers). Mike Resnick was the unofficial sponsor for the IMPs. Many of the IMPs are now published writers. Most of them publish real science fiction. I think I may be the only non-fiction specialist in the group. I joined the IMPs in 1992. I stay in touch with some of them. Anyway, you’ll be able to read biographies of some of the IMPs on this site and learn more about their books and stories. Support your local (or favorite) IMP!
Who are the Compuserve IMPs (besides me)? They include Ann Marston (Kingmaker’s Sword), Derek Patterson (“The Phoenix Agenda”), John Urbancik (Darkwalker), Josh Langston (Treason, Treason!), Lisa Mantchev, Barb Galler-Smith, Lisa Silverthorne, and many others. Too many to name in this already ridiculously long article. It’s not easy to find information about the Compuserve IMPs any more. In one of their insane purges, Wikipedia destroyed the only good article about the group there was for years. That inspired me to make the IMPs subdomain even better.
SQUEAKY XENITE – Um, this is an experimental site. There used to be something else here but that project died on the vine. I did not want to get rid of the subdomain so I created a funky directory here that indexes headlines from other sites. It probably would not hurt you to browse these listings. You’ll have to wait for them to recache just as with the network news site.
GAMING WEBSITES TODAY – This is a hybrid Website. I’m not sure how to describe it. It’s also experimental and it’s more closely connected to the online gaming Websites that I co-develop and sometimes write for with my business partner, Randy Ray. Most of the sites you’ll find listed or mentioned here publish articles about online gambling but this Xenite.Org Website does not link to or promote any online casinos. Some of our gaming Websites are about board games, card games, and other non-gambling types of games.
THE SHOPPE AT XENITE.ORG – Xenite.Org has had some kind of “gift shop” since the 1990s. It’s an affiliate Website where we promote products (mostly from Amazon now) associated with science fiction and fantasy or anything else that takes our fancy. Turn off your ad blockers if you want to see all the product listings. You’ll find articles about huckleberries, freeze dried foods, and some pretty cool camping gear as well as the usual science fiction and fantasy stuff. Your purchases through these affiliate links help pay for our server, so we ALWAYS appreciate your support.
HARRY POTTER AT XENITE.ORG – This is an old site, the last of the old school subdomains. A new site is in development but is only half-finished. When that site goes live this one will redirect to it. This is the last static HTML (non-WordPress) subdomain on Xenite.Org. This site was always a work in progress but I hope one day to add more content than what we have here. I love Harry Potter. I just lack time and energy for doing more with this topic.
SUB-SECTIONS ON XENITE.ORG’S ROOT DOMAIN
Well, all of those subdomains are pretty cool but there is still plenty of stuff to be found on the main part of the site. It’s just hard to organize it. When I first brought back Xenite.Org I wasn’t sure what to do with the old static HTML articles. Should they be POSTs or PAGEs? I probably should have made them pages, but the whole site is kind of a mess now.
Here is a list of sections published as PAGEs:
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS – This is all that remains of the old ERB fan section we had on Xenite. To do him justice, I’ll probably one day (not this year) set up a subdomain.
SPECIAL FEATURES – If you notice I use “special” and “features” a lot in naming sections it’s because I have no idea of what else to call this stuff. There are some Emma Watson, Grace Park (“Battlestar Galactica”, “Hawaii Five-Oh”), and Scarlett Johansson picture galleries here, but they are a bit old. You’ll find other “feature” sections listed below.
ANDRE NORTON FAN SITE – This section will eventually be moved to its own subdomain. The plan is to do that when we’re finished updating the Harry Potter fan site. Our Andre Norton fan site was once the premier Andre Norton site on the Web. It has now been surpassed by an archive with access to material we cannot possibly hope to match but Andre herself once browsed this site and she was very complimentary about it. I’m glad she got to see it and enjoyed it, though I think she also had a couple of objections.
THE PHANTOM MENACE – This is the absolute best of all the George Lucas “Star Wars” movies. You don’t have to agree with me but you might enjoy reading these pages anyway.
XENITE.ORG 10TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL FEATURE – This is quite an extensive archive of articles we published in 2007 to celebrate 10 years of Web fandom on the Xenite.Org network. It includes interviews with some famous people and a much more extensive retrospective than the current article you are reading. People still enjoy visiting this section.
Here is a list of sections published as POSTs (by category):
ANNOUNCEMENTS – Well, we still announce stuff about Xenite.Org, so I guess we may not use the news subdomain in the future. I don’t know. I’m making this up as I go along.
ESSAYS – I am an essayist, and I essay a great deal, quite often, and whenever the fancy takes me. These are very old essays and they include a couple from Dixie that you can pry from my cold, dead fingers.
10TH ANNIVERSARY – Wait, don’t we have a PAGEs section for the 10th anniversary? It’s chaos around here, I tell you! Chaos! Oh, Dixie, we need you now!
GALLERIES – Yeah, well, the picture galleries are schizophrenic, too.
TOLKIEN – Good, grief, Charlie Brown! There are seven Tolkien articles here, too!
Findegil’s Insider’s Guide – This is actually a sub-section of the Tolkien section. It’s also “fan fiction”. When I found myself trying to keep this sub-category section’s posts separate from the main category’s posts I realized I had much to learn about how to manage a blog. Some day, these articles will find a new home. Somewhere …
The Fairy Tales of J.R.R. Tolkien – Oh, good grief! This is the rest of the “Tolkien Section”! It’s madness, I tell you! Madness!
TREASURE HUNTING – Yes, I have really gone treasure hunting, if you count sifting through piles of dirt for opals and sapphires to be treasure hunting. These articles are still very popular. I guess other people are looking for tips on how to hunt for sapphires and opals.
TV (COMMERCIAL) – We once had a fair number of articles about weird television commercials. Or else we planned to at one point. This section of POSTs only has one article about the GEICO tiny house commercial. Probably no one cares any more but I am loathe to do away with it.
FOOD – We used to have a very popular Website about white Mexican cheese dip. What happened to it? Well, the world grew up and discovered white Mexican cheese dip. We became less relevant and I was tired of updating the listing of restaurants and stores west of the Mississippi river where you could get the cheese dip. Unless you live on the West Coast (California, Oregon, and Washington) you can probably buy all the white cheese dip you want in your local grocery store, Walmart, Sam’s Club, Costco, or BJ’s. If not, you can probably get it on the Web. But I could tell you some stories about cheese dip that would curl your toe nails!
INTERVIEWS – Yes, Xenite.Org occasionally publishes interviews with actors and authors. We used to have more but I’m not sure of what became of them. Probably scattered across the network. I love doing interviews but they are a lot of hard work.
STUFF – This is the newest category for Xenite.Org. It only has 1 recent article in it. The category will probably be folded into something else later this year.
And that is it. This is our little Website. Many Bothans died bringing Xenite.Org to you– well, what I mean is that, a LOT of people have contributed something to this site through the years. Most of their old contributions are gone but had they not done their parts the Xenite that remains today would be much smaller. This is still, to me, very much a Website dedicated to science fiction and fantasy fans and fandom. And I hope it’s here for at least another 20 years.
Thank you for being there today, yesterday, and twenty years ago.
Congratulations! That is a huge amount of work and dedication. I have never tasted a huckleberry. Now you make me want to try one.