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| <<<>>> |
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The Story of UGN |
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| Created by Decius at
| [+ favourites]
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If you're viewing this, there is one out of a number of explanations as to why you are here.
1. You were annoyed that I e-mailed you and wanted to come see how bad the new creation was.
2. You were excited that I e-mailed you and wanted to come see how bad the new creation was.
3. You are a regular on Undergrounds and are just exploring.
4. You are a regular on Undergrounds and want to eat up everything I can dish out.
5. You found this through a search engine and really have no idea what it is about.
6. You're related to me or are one of my friends and are doing me a favour by providing me with much needed support.
If you don't fit in one of the above six choices, I welcome you nevertheless. I'm sorry I couldn't envision your path, although I'm sure that it was spectacular, and rightly so because you are now here.
History
1998 - 2000
Undergrounds.com, in its first incarnation was a hobby website. It had information on how to find MP3s on the web, online gaming hints (for the game Starcraft), and of course, celebrities (actually, just pictures of good looking women). Launched in December, the site did reasonable with its thirty or so visitors a day. Of course, I thought I was receiving about nine hundred visitors a day since I assumed "Hits" actually meant "Unique Visitors". The site was re-designed and re-vamped approximately 3 times in this period.
2000 - 2001
The advent of PHP (Dynamic HTML to you) was great cause for change. Undergrounds.com, now with a rather large number of celebrity images was being managed by highly inneficient scripts that created thousands of HTML pages every time the site was updated. I do believe I had approximately 45 thousand HTML pages generated that served each and every image on the site.
At this point I had no formal knowledge of programming...in fact, I still don't. However, I learnt PHP in about 2 weeks, and learnt on the new version of Undergrounds.com. Many of you have probably never seen this version, although this was the version that made me believe I could actually make a living out of this profession. I joined the IGN network (IGN.com) and they were fantastic. I served ads for them during the internet boom and made a reasonable living.
The new site taught me a few things. The first being PHP and MySQL (Dynamic HTML and databases, respectively). With dynamic coding, I was able to serve the entire site and all its data in a total of 5 pages, 2 of which served 99% of the data. That was much better than the 40 thousand or so static pages I had otherwise. The second thing was specialization. With the new site, I dropped all other areas and focussed solely on pictures of good looking women. And at this point, traffic built up. I was pulling in approximately 2 thousand unique visitors a day (not hits), which is quite a lot if you think about it.
But I did not feel complete in it, and almost immediately began devloping and theorizing about a complete version of Undergrounds, a version that would encompass everything I wanted in an online website.
And so over a year, I built it, from scratch, learning all sorts of things along the way...
2001 - February 2003
In 2001 I launched a much larger version of Undergrounds.com. It now transversed the gender border and included male celebrity pictures and information.
Not only that, but it had an entire user signup and login interface, as well as a discussion board, chat rooms, instant messaging, matchmaking and more.
Unfortunately, the fact that this site was stuffed with so many things was the exact reason it did not succeed the way I wanted it to.
Many users would visit the site and not really know what to do. Rarely do people take the time to explore a site, and with good reason since the web is filled with useless places.
Soon the site became more popular, however, and traffic levels rose considerably. Although that is a method of success on the web, I really wanted people to use the other parts of the site. I wanted people to interract more and to explore.
So I concluded that specialization was necessary. I would do what everyone else on the web does... I would specialize so that visitors get exactly what they want immediately, but still keep all the areas tied together.
This is what a "Network" is.
February 2003 - Present
After another large development cycle, what you see before you was created. A large network of 5 sites that specialize in their own distinct way.
You can browse the web directory at Undergrounds.com and find information about anything you want.
You can then use that information to win an argument in Captain Cynic, or perhaps find out what other people think of that information via a poll.
Then take a break and browse the thousands of images at PerfectPeople.net. Find out information about Tom Cruise or Pamela Anderson, or just see what new faces joined us in the last day.
Once you've had your fill of beautiful people, move to the real world and browse thousands of profiles at the Gnome Network (gno-me-network). Users create their own profiles, about themselves, their pets, their cars, their thoughts, ravings, poetry or stories. Find someone like yourself and start a conversation. Who knows...
Use Selit.net as a reference guide. Find out how much what you want is being sold for...or actually contact someone about a product in the database. Find a job, find a service, post a job, post a service. An online marketplace, completely free.
This is the final incarnation of the Undergrounds.com "idea". Sure, we'll change things here and there, we'll add cool new things and remove old useless things...but from now on, memorizing these urls will always be useful for you.
Below is the initial piece of paper I jotted down idea on as I came up with Undergrounds.com in Actuarial Mathematics class in university. |
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| Created by Decius at
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