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In the early 1990's I was working a job that had me traveling extensively. Staying in hotels was pretty boring, and the Internet as consumer product was still new so CompuServe account in hand I started browsing the Internet instead of watching TV (yay for company laptops!). After a while I became interested in how the pages were created and wanted to try it for myself. I dropped CompuServe and signed up with a large ISP that had national access numbers and provided me with some web hosting space.
Like most folks my first site was just a personal homepage. This was where I learned how to code basic HTML, and to this day I still do a lot of coding by hand in text editors. Not to toot my own horn too loudly, but I became so skilled at hand coding with browser compatibility in mind I was a moderator and HTML guru in residence for several years at Virtual Promote/JimWorld, one of the most prominent and high traffic webmaster/web promotion sites on the web.
As is typical on a personal page I had a page of links. Because of my love for SF&F the majority of the links were genre related, and over time the number grew to the point that I had to categorize them into sections. Really, this was my "online bookmark collection", the way I used to visit the sites I liked no matter where I was. A little later on I started to display some artworks I found on the web, always with the artist's permission of course.
One day it dawned on me that I was getting traffic on my home page. Examining my logs I discovered that I was getting a significant number of visitors to both the art and my bookmark collection. I was both stunned and pleased and decided that I should do something more formal with them since people were looking at them.
Much of the existing "this is my homepage" crap was scrapped and in 1996 the site officially became:
Speculative Vision: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Resource Network
At that time the vast majority of visitors were there for the links, which is why I used that rather cumbersome name. I maintained every one of those links by hand...hundreds of links in dozens of categories complete with my own personal descriptions of what you would find when you went there. The new design was an instant hit, receiving mention on several fan sites driving the traffic up.
I also began working on formalizing the art gallery, but like the links network its design was uniquely set up to be more promotional for the artists than it was "site content". A couple of images only, with a link to their own site so they could receive traffic from those that liked what they saw. As it expanded the art gallery took off in its own right and was soon responsible for just as much traffic as the link directory, and most sites began to mention the art gallery as a primary reason to visit.
For a while I offered a site award (The Visionary Award) that people could apply for. Winners received a special icon and top of section listing in the resource network. The award was dropped a couple of years later because those types of award programs fell out of favor.
I also had one of the largest collections of SF&F themed midi music files. I was forced to remove them when the music Nazi's came rampaging across the web demanding massive fees for fans to hear some blips and beeps that sounded like favorite theme songs
.
The Interactive Story was added, as was the game arcade. Both have proved popular enough additions, with the story in particular being quite well visited even to this day (The Adventures of Jerod has over 1800 chapters).
The Interactive Movies were added much later via a syndication deal and are now being removed because that syndication is no longer offered.
The poll and news wire were added but I have neglected them horribly
. Their fate is now in debate as I redesign the site.
Eventually in this process I registered the domain name speculativevision.com and formally changed the name to just Speculative Vision, using the resource network name only for that portion of the site. With the domain registration came a new design and new site sections...this is the design you are all familiar with and is still on the static portions of the site awaiting a face lift.
I tried out several forums, eventually deciding on the Discus forum (the one you were using all this time) because of its sub-category features, which at the time was pretty unique for a forum. I did not have access to a mysql database from my host and Discus didn't use a database so this worked out well...of course this bit me in the butt now that I changed software and had no way to convert our existing data! The forums formally opened on Sep 03, 1998, with the posting of a couple of my own poems. They weren't an overnight success by any means, but we had posts trickle in and over time I was fortunate to gain not only a great community of frequent posters, but some fantastic moderators (who here doesn't know that Bmat is a goddess?). When I switched to this new software the old forums occupied over 250mb of hosting space and over 50,000 posts (noting that we made several aggressive prunings over time when I had storage space issues).
On August 14, 2000, Science Fiction Weekly, the Scifi Channel's online magazine, featured Speculative Vision as its Site of Week on Scifi.com. Yes, it did make me feel quite godly thanks for asking
Traffic on the site has fluctuated over time as it tends to do. Interestingly enough although the reason for visits (i.e. which parts of the site gets the most traffic) has changed the overall traffic has been relatively consistent. For those that care about such things in 2004 we averaged approximately 20,000 unique visits a month generating 1,750,000 hits to our server. We currently serve approximately 140,000 page views, requiring 6GB in monthly bandwidth.
While the traffic numbers here aren't mind blowing by a long shot, I feel remarkably fortunate to have had my silly little "how do I kill time in that hotel" website not just become fairly popular, but also to have it remain so for almost 9 years now.
I humbly thank you all from the bottom of my heart for gracing my efforts with your continued visits and active participation. I am so lucky to be able to host your discussions, and look forward to doing so for many more years to come.
and the cat 
and...the others!!
