Web

I grew up at the same time as the World Wide Web. We met sometime around my 10th birthday. I remember Juno free webmail and AOL before buddy lists. I remember running up the hourly charge on my mom’s early era Windows PC. I loved AOL’s early role playing games, usually ones where you had to puzzle out logic problems. And chat – the whole idea of chat, instant messages and contact with unknown people from all around the world, excited and made formative changes in me I didn’t realize were happening until I made my first web site.

It was on Crosswinds. Does anyone remember Crosswinds? It had a Star Warsy twilight background, with gold text and a spinny animated .gif of my name.

I went through a series of blogs – Tripod, Geocities, etc. More important than the stream of Web sites, however, was the e-mailing: I suddenly started making friends who were all unique and interesting in their own way, who shared a lot of my likes and dislikes, who were different ages and professions. Going to college wasn’t scary when I had friends as far flung as France (which I thought was so, so far at the time).

It was only a matter of time before I wed my other budding interests with the Web. I joined The Leaky Cauldron‘s editorial staff (me and about two other active editors, including Rames El Dousouki and B.K. DeLong) in 2001. Within a few years I had become obsessed and started taking the site as far as I thought I could, as far as I thought was possible, with help always from a core, dedicated, team of amazing staffers. Together we have won awards from J.K. Rowling, Yahoo!, the Webbys, and more, but really, the best recognition we ever got for our efforts creating and sustaining a community was seeing them live at LeakyCon 2009.

Leaky is now 10 years old. That is ancient for a Web site. There’s not a single day I’m not proud and thrilled to be associated with such a fantastic online community.