warning: wall of text incoming

15 years is a looooong damn time on the internet... i registered this domain name on aug 23, 1995, and had a skeleton site up and running the next day... i can remember as clearly as if it were yesterday when i came up with the name. i was sitting in the pizza inn on irving blvd (which is now long gone) with my ex-wife, gobbling pizza and washing it down with a pitcher of beer as i brainstormed ideas... i knew i wanted something unique, something that resonated with me... and it literally popped into my head like a bolt from the blue: everything weve known before the internet has been familiar ground, solid and tangible... terra firma, if you will... but this new, electronic world was a frontier, real yet ephemeral, existing solely in the electrons carrying its soul, and the minds of the users who perceived it. a terra virtua, if ever there was one.

theres been a lot of changes. i went from being the premier VRML site on the internet (which didnt take much, it was an obscure technology that never really took off, and is now long dead), to trying to run a big-time gaming site a la IGN, gamespot, et al... i realized that i didnt actually care about the wider world of gaming and that when im not interested or engaged in a thing, well, i just dont work on it. which led to me discarding the gaming supersite idea in favor of a site focused on the Jagged Alliance series of games.

i once again found myself in possession of the premier site for the subject matter. for a while, i was serving multiple-millions of hits a month, with close to 500k unique hosts served monthly... around this time i realized i needed a forum for my visitors to talk about the games, and i needed to learn more about perl for my job, so the site again became my test-bed and learning center, and SQLboard software was born. inspired by WWWboard, it got rid of the cumbersom file-based system used by wwwboard in favor of a fully dynamic forum driven from a database. it was a great piece of software, using a fully threaded messaging system. it was, however, inadequate...

i found myself wanting to learn PHP... so, i started over again. this time i built what was, at the time, the most advanced, most capable web forum software on the internet. other forum software packages had begun to catch up, in terms of technology, and use database-driven back-ends instead of file-based systems... but they were *all* un-threaded, flat message listings. first-in-first-out. some people like this. i hated it, which is why i had written a threaded system. however, i realized that i needed to make a piece of software that was flexible enough to please both sides. the forum allowed users to chose how they wanted to view the site, flat or threaded, and i threw in an additional previously never before seen "hybrid" view combining the best qualities of flat and threaded viewing styles... that was the core innovation, but i didnt stop there. the software was fully customizable in terms of how the user viewed it: colors, fonts, font sizes, everything. now, i realize that this is no big deal today... but consider that this was pre-CSS. i had to develop a specialized templating system to make this happen. and while there were other web softwares that allowed for some degree of "skinning" none of them put this in the user's hands... the idea that someone ELSE could dictate how your site looked?? BLASPHEMY! :) i also took the user-focused approach ones step further. with a fully-developed, unix-like system of permissions and privileges, it was possible to allow users to created their OWN collections of forums. they could be public or private, they could be read-only (or selectively read-only), the user had full administrative control over their forums, and could delegate permissions to other users as they saw fit. they could, in effect, run their own site through my software, and a number of people did exactly that.

today, these innovations are more or less common in the few remaining "big" forum softwares. but i did it first. i pioneered that shit. and i know for a fact it influenced the development of those big packages still floating around... i know because i had offers from two of them to buy my codebase outright for pretty decent sums of cash. in retrospect, i realize i should have sold out immediately :) but at the time i was prideful (and doing well financially) and i passed. ive also had, through the years, 4 offers to buy my domain name from one company or another... one of them, a BIG company, that wanted the name to brand a line of consumer electronics. they offered a retarded sum of money (eventually, because i kept telling them no) for the domain. and i didnt sell. and again, i wish i had. that particular offer came right at the height of the dot-com bubble... and i could have made out like a fucking BANDIT if i had just sold out. but i didnt.

and, as happens in general and the internet in particular, the world moves on. the jagged alliance games faded into obscurity for all but the most die-hard fans. the other forums softwares began to catch up with, and surpass, my own. the userbase dwindled, and i found myself not really caring. shortly after the beginning of 2003, after a year-long stint of unemployment from the dot-com collapse, i came to the conclusion that the window of opportunity for making it big on the internet had passed. i felt kinda like the guy that sat on the roof of his house while the flood waters rose, and kept telling the rescuers to pass on by because god would protect him... then when he dies, he asks god in heaven "where were you??" and he says "i sent you 3 damn boats!"... i had several boats row up to the roof and offer to toss me a suitcase of cash, and i didnt take it, either because i believed i could make my own suitcase of cash (and then it would be MINE!) or because i thought there would be an even bigger suitcase just around the corner. pride and greed, in other words. ah if only i had it to do over again... but i dont, so i dont dwell on it...

so anyhow like i was saying... the site had faded into obcsurity, i only had about 20 regular users left, and i just... didnt care. i felt like trying to keep up with the site was becoming too much of a pain in the ass, and i didnt want to re-write yet another new forum software (that id then have to manage)... so, some time early 2003, i decided to ditch the forums entirely and make a personal blog. it was originally adapted from the old forum software, but now 3 iterations later it is its own completely original piece of code. if you couldnt tell already, its a vanity site :) its nice that some people read it (more than i expect, actually, its somewhere around 100 daily readers, which i find absolutely amazing) but i dont really care if they do or not. its a place for me to blow off steam, and a place for me to test new ideas or learn new techniques from a technology standpoint... for example, this latest iteration is 100% object oriented, and 100% decoupled in terms of data vs display and formatting. there is ZERO formatting information in the markup, only structural definition. what you see is completely driven by CSS. it also makes use of some clever (i think) techniques for DOM manipulation to provide stuff like edit-in-place... but now im getting too technical, i know :)

so that brings us to today. happy 15th, terravirtua, its been a long and winding road...