On this day exactly one year ago, the site went live and shortly thereafter, underwent catastrophic cardiac arrest due to a number of very silly bugs. After that day, it was pretty stable. I uploaded most of my gallery (see link above) on August 16, 2001.
The really big diference then was that all the series names used to be shared. I expected maybe 20 people to find a use for this site. Of course, after about 5 users, we realized that depending on other people's spelling of a series just wasn't going to cut it. A lot of other stuff was just plain broken. I am proud to say that we haven't lost a single item through any technical failures and the site has never been down for more than a few hours at a time. (Don't worry, we have daily backups.)
Surprisingly enough, most of the functionality you see today was present in the original release.
Today, there are over 450 users and 12,000 cels floating around in the database. Well, okay, some of those pictures are of Kompressor (
http://sailorgoon.rubberslug.com) and his prom date, but that's still over 12,000. Technically, I should him to take those down, but I don't want to break the guy's heart.
So, thank all those brave souls who tested that stinker before the masses arrived and worked out (mostly) all of the bugs so that you could enjoy this nifty website today. Special thanks goes out of Chris, Flipyon, Diana, and all who endured that first week of evil and still appear to be updating their galleries on this site today.
Real work on the site is on hold for the moment, but will continue in a few weeks. In a few months, you should be able to see some truly radical changes to the way this site works. (With one developer on such a large project using only spare time, things sometimes go uncomfortably slow.)
One final stat: RS members have over 3000 items in their wishlists. I have one more to add to that -- but this being our birthday, if I were to tell you what it is, it wouldn't come true.
*blows out candle*
jn
