¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! Historical Society

¡DavE!'s Page of Useless Information

Introduction:

Picture it Everett Washington Circa 1998. Late night ¡DavE! Create's something that would change the internet forever!!! ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! The original site started out as a one page site named Evad's World and had no graphics or images. Luckilly I realized the need to keep things updated. To bring the site I present you today.

In the begining:

I always wanted to have my own web page since the start of my getting onto the internet. In 1993, I was on AOL. The internet was pretty new at the time and I became instantly fascinated with it. At the time I was promoting bands and decided it would be great to have my company then called "No Souvenirs" have it's own web site. Back then it was pretty expensive to start a site and so I found a free service that supposedly would start a web site. But after researching it was more like an informational card about your self. I then realized that AOL gave a free page with it's service. So I decided to work on creating a page in AOL. Unfortunately, I had little time and patients to figure out how to create a web site. So I bagged it.

And then, boredom sets in...

Five years later and three thousand soap operas later, I got my own computer again. At first I would get on the web, talk to people and then play Sim City 2000 all night. After a while this got boring. So I decided to learn html. I downloaded a program off the internet called hot dog. This program was pretty user friendly. So I decided to create a page to learn how to create a page. After a lot of thought I decided to call my page ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! or the page of useless information. I decided to keep this page going for about three months and after that, I would create a new page. The page I wanted to create eventually would be one that would be about the history of Music and bands in the Pacific Northwest. Needless to say, that page never happened and ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! has. Before I started, I used to send this to everyone on the web. It was filled with my contact information which back then was only 1 E-mail address. So who is Digger Wells? Digger Wells was the name of a band I used to manage back in 1992. I liked the name of the band a lot and I decided to transform it onto the net. In fact one of my original names for the page was ¡Digger Wells! Home page. After a while, I liked ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! better. However, I have always kept the Digger Wells name in my E-mail addresses, and in the page's URL. With the new move to the datombar server, this has changed. Digger Wells has officially moved off. But read on to see where digger's future lies.

DAY ONE. . .

On 19 April at 12:00 a.m. ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! was officially launched on the web. The page was on a free hosting service called Crosswinds. The original page was very bland and boring. There were no graphics just text. The background was dark gray. That's it. It didn't take long to realize that I had better change the page or else no one would want to visit.

FEATURES, WEEKLY UPDATES, ETC. . .

So the first thing I added was a logo. Two spinning worlds and the ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! The next thing I decided to do was to have a Feature of the month. Our first ever feature of the month was on the comedy central hit television show South Park. Also this month, FAQ's, links, what's new, and archives were all started and became standard pages in the site.

MAY STARTS A BUSY MONTH. . .

May started a busy month. First I posted the second ever feature of the month called all you wanted to know about Stevie Nicks. Then I decided that I would add a weekly newsletter. The newsletter had news about me, unusual places and my personal favorite, the Useless facts. Also in the newsletter, I decided to have a Web site of the week and month. The Web site of the Week had to be a site that was weird or unusual. And man have we got some really strange ones over the years. On 9 May the counter was added. The site became so popular we hit 100 within the first month the counter was up. I also added the guest book to the site. My first guest was Belle. Towards the end of the month, I decided to move this site from Crosswinds to Gte. The decision was made after too many problems with crosswinds. I knew at this point I wanted to make ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! into something better. So I knew I would need a better server to do it. That is why we moved to gte.

THE NEED TO VENT MY CREATIONS. . .

In June I personalized my site with a little bio about me. I also added a mini book of poems and songs I had written. The four songs were in a book called Muestra. This year more of my works will be published here on the net soon.

FEATURES GET BIGGER AND BETTER. . .

Every month a new feature was updated and published. My favorite was the Day of the Dead published in November. The features were chosen by either holidays such as Christmas, or by what was popular at the time, such as The TV Talk shows. Some of the features we had in the past year were seasonal others turned into mainstays.

MOVING, RENOVATIONS ETC. . .

In the 1998 the site was moved three times and remodeled just about as much as well. In October, both happened at once. Due to a change in rates at gte. I was forced to move the site to another server. This was a hard decision since I had just established my site on gte. Finally after much trouble searching, I settled with Earthlink.net. I was very happy with my move to Earthlink.net. The site loads much faster now and hits increased. Also at the same time of the move, I remodeled the site and put it into frames. I also split the newsletter into six pages. The frames looked good a first but then I realized it was too hard to navigate and dropped the frames format after the holidays. In January another new look was made. The space background was dropped from the newsletter and made to be more professional. Fake frames were set up to keep navigation easy. Also What's new and Music News pages were dropped from the site and integrated into the newsletter. The Archive index was dropped due to redundancy. In February the Newsletter pages were changed to reflect this change. ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! will always be under construction in one way or another. Keep checking weekly to see what's new.

1999 A YEAR OF MOVING IN NEW DIRECTIONS, AND REFLECTION

In 1999, we celebrated our first year. During this year we added several new things to the site including book of lists, Joke of the week and Useless Trivia of the week. We also came to the conclusion that we were running out of space fast on our server. So we started a new site called ULTRA MEGA LINKS. This was a tuff decision because we wanted to keep links on the site. However with the amount of links we collected over the years, it was just not possible. 1999 also saw the start of our major remodel. It lasted longer than we expected and we are doing the 2000 remodel much differently.

Y2K AND BEYOND!!!

Well our usual update didn't happen on time this year due to a major computer crash and due to the fact that we had to create another site for our Archive files. The Warehouse opened in May and contains all of our past features of them month and newsletters. So what's in store for the rest of the year. We anticipate the completion of the remodel in June. Then not much more will happen until next year. That is when we plan to .com our site. A name has even been selected. I anticipate that the name of the site will have to change as well. This however, is at least a year off.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS(2000-2001)

Late in 2000, a decision of where to take ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web next had to be made. Our hits were dropping like flies and even I was bored doing this every week. In addition, I had tons of new ideas for web sites none of which would be able to be incorporated into ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! So I decided to kill it. But then I thought about it, even if only 1 person comes to view my site, it would be worth it to have it on the net. So I decided to go monthly. I just couldn't go weekly anymore due to other projects and as tradition has it there, had to be a remodel, so here we are! ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! 2001!

2001-A too many roadblocks

In mid 2001, I made the decision to start renovating the sites that I had starting with Ultra Mega Links. However, halfway through the renovation process, ¡DavE!'s computer crashed and the host at the time Crosswinds lost Ultra Mega Links as well. Thus Ultra Mega Links was lost and we had to start over from scratch.

2002-A new era in the works...

In 2002, I decided to concentrate on the features of the month at ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! The results of this were some of our most popular features including the Clairvoyant ¡DavE!, and our newest permanent feature Concrete Blonde Tribute page. However a change was in the works. Ultra Mega Links needed to be redone so it was a regular website and The Warehouse was our most embarrassing site.

2003 Time to buckle down...

So in 2003 we made the decision to buckle down. No chatting, surfing, fixing or anything until the sites were renovated and completed. Starting with the warehouse. Work started in November of 2002 creating what was to be Classic ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! But then it hit me...that that was quite lame. So The Legacy of ¡DavE! came up and went from there. I decided to redo what I had started. This was about 800 pages of work. Finally In March, the new Legacy of ¡DavE! was posted. Done with that I started work on the new Ultra Mega Links. Luckilly, they invented internet archive and we were able to get back about 80% of the original links that were posted there. Ultra Mega Links was posted in April. So that leaves ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! There hadn't been a major renovation in nearly 3 years of ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! so it was long over due. The first order of business was the logo and graphics. It took nearly ten days to come up with the logo alone. (Hey I'm picky) the rest came to me. Next order of business was getting rid of the guestbook. It was through a third party vendor and breeds spam. I decided to create my own and rename it testimonials. Next order of business was content. I decided that I wanted to bring back some of the old features of the original ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! So I put ¡DavE!'s News back in the form of a weblog and added a news ticker.

2004 The year we said goodbye.

It was actually in 2003 that I decided to stop doing ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! I remember in about May of 2003 thinking that I was a chore to do the site on a monthly basis. In the past year the site became in my eyes mundane. Don't get me wrong, I love doing websites and have loved working on ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! all these years. It's been one of my proudest accomplishments. However, Like the child that has graduated college, it's time to move on to better things. If I felt that I could continue to make ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! into something exceptional and great, I would be continuing it. However, i'm all tapped out with it. So I moved all of the features to Legacy of ¡DavE! and Decided to Redesign ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! one last time.

In closing, I want to thank all of those who have visited ¡DavE!'s Whirled Wide Web! as well as those who have signed the testimonials page. It has been a very fun and challenging hobby to have.
-Thanks Very Much
¡DavE!