Menu
Club Josh

Ten Years

Ten years ago today, one of my co-workers at UC Davis let me put a single web page up on one of our servers. It wasn’t much, just a photo of me, some text about myself, and some links to some web sites that I really liked. One of the first things I added to the site was photos of the Gorn traveling the world. Within a year, the site grew to include my Movie Czar Reel Reviews, my online video catalog, Disneyland Paris photos, and my own resort island page. It is funny to look back over ten years and realize the backbone of the site was up by 1997, and since then it has been add something here and drop something there.

The early days of Club Josh were plagued by server crashes (but hey when it’s on a low-priority server, that tends to happen. November 1997, we finally moved to 2xtreme.net (are they still around?). They didn’t last too long because in June of 1998 for the third anniversary, we migrated to JPS.net. June of 2000 we finally moved to clubjosh.com (of course it took several months to get the whole thing organized.

The Daily Update launched in October 2000 and personally, the fact I still do it (though not nearly as much as I like) is amazing. Then again, the fact I have had a web site for 10 years is also amazing. Wait… The fact people actually read my website is amazing.

The dark years of 2002-2004 certainly saw a major slowdown in the development of the site. I think part of it was burnout from working at Edmunds, other since working at Disney I have had less time to spend in front of a computer playing with the site. The latter half of 2004 started to see things pick up, and hopefully it will continue.

What lies ahead for the site? Well if you read yesterday’s post, you will see I have some ambitious plans. Since I already have the domain name and really can’t move the site, I guess I just need more control of the server – so before I go to Hong Kong in August, I will port over the site. In a way, I hope that in this tenth anniversary year I will lay the infrastructure to let Club Josh grow in the next 10 years and beyond, wherever my little brain takes me.

I’m glad you are all here and special thanks to Cooper, Joe, Susie, Robert, Dave H., Haim, Reed, Peggy, Matt, Kris, and Mom for giving me tips, technical advice, and being the beta testers whenever I needed one.