A New Approach
London Calling
I had been offered a job at a record company in London and this meant leaving Leicester. Because i was a contract that got renewed every few months i was unable to actually live in London for fear that i wouldn't be able to afford the rent should the contracts run out. My parents were in Spain at the time and they let use the house in England to commute to London. The house was located in a village so there was fuck all to do at night, and it was around this time that i started to drink more. As the empty absinth bottles piled up on my bedroom floor, i became more opinionated about things and i decided to sober up and finish off the new 'beach so that i could upload photos and journals direct from the web browser. I started to lay off the booze and got to work messing around with databases and web design, using what little knowledge i had used to bluff me my new job.
Birth of the 'Beach
Fast forward to October 2002. I had been working at my new job for around six months and felt confident that i could goof off now and then. One lunchtime saw everyone in the office getting ready to go out for a curry, and i decided to launch the new Vanilla Beach. It had been sitting on the website, dormant and awaiting for input, so i figured i may as well start with a pre-lunchtime
journal. In a previous excursion to London,
Josh had snapped a few interesting pictures around Tottenham Court Road, so i pinched a couple of his photos and attached them to the journals to make them look more interesting. I then started adding various small photo and artwork compositions, as well as stealing other people's photos and art that i thought was interesting and used them in my blogs to jazz things up a little. I never really paid much attention to copyright as i never had any big plans for the website.
Things get interesting
After a few months of hestitant journalism (most of them about pigeons and vague work-related anecdotes), i added a membership section and a messageboard that would allow my friends to liase with each other. I also added private journal entries - viewable only to members - so that i could be more profane and angry than in public. Currently, there are over 3500 message on the board, and hundreds of photos. Once my friends from uni and college joined up, things started to get interesting. At work i had been teamed up with a rather large
Australian whose grip on
reality was
slipping at an
alarming rate. Encouraged by the increasingly random evens going on around me, i decided to write down the
things that i was getting involved with.
Vital Statistics
Readership of the 'beach started to increase too. Original stats from 2001 indicated that the site was getting around 200 hits a month, roughly 2500 hits a year. (By 2007, this had increased to around 35,000 hits a month. As of October 2007, there have been over 430,000 hits so far. In August 2007, there were over 2000 unique visitors to the site.) This is most likely attributed to the the two texts found in the "junk" section of the site - George Steinback's "
Of Mice and Men", required reading for american english students, and George Orwell's "
1984". Although Vanilla Beach doesn't use keywords to grab the attention of search engines, it's still listed at the
number 1 source for Steinback's novel on Google. The 'beach
ranks at number 10 for Orwell's book. Some might say that this gives an unbalance perception of how popular the 'beach is, and i totally agree. But then the site was never out to win ratings, and i really like those two books.
Settling Down
Like every other blog out there, Vanilla Beach had carved out a niche on the web, and everything looked good. However, the code behind the 'beach was somewhat cobbled together (mostly under the influence of absinth) and was a becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Adding the ability to change skins turned into a nightmare, and i decided to completely re-write the entire back-end to seperate content generation from layout. Three years since it's official launch in 2002, Vanilla Beach was taken down once again and relaunched with a better interface and code architecure. New features included an internal messaging system, more membership features and a diary/calendar system. There was also a news ticker to keep people up-to-date with new photos and media added to system. So far it's held together pretty well, despite jumping from three different web hosts in five year.
The Future
Work is already in progress for yet another new Vanilla Beach. The site will have a totally new look, be more browser compatible and take advantage of the PNG image
technology to allow sharper images with no loss of compression. The layout will also be easier on the eye and each section will have better focus. Social Networks have increased the competition in the battle for on-line loyalty but the 'beach is not a part of that battle. Sites like
Facebook do not offer their members the ability to write blogs or editorials, whereas
MySpace is just plain ugly. Vanilla Beach never intended to make a statement or become a popular website. It always has been and will continue be a fun experiment, as well as a place for my friends to visit and find out what i've been up to. Here's to the next five years...
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