Back in the early wild west days of the World Wide Web, there was no Amazon.com or Drudge Report or Margaritaville.com.
There was no Netscape, or Internet Explorer, you used Mosaic as your browser.
There was no way to search the incredible amount of information that was popping up every day because there was no Yahoo or Excite or AltaVista. You'd read newsgroups or go to Mosaic's What's New page to see what new information had cropped up.
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The USENET community of alt.fan.jimmy-buffett was an active newsgroup. A bunch of us in a.f.j-b started talking about how revolutionary the Web thing was going to be, we all agreed that it couldn't possibly succeed without having readily acccessible information about Jimmy Buffett on it! I was in a fellowship program at the Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University and I had the time and resources available to put up one of thee new-fangled web site things. |
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In my office at ILS I had a spare Mac II and I set it up as a webserver running MacHTTP. I posted on the newsgroup that it was available. So what the heck were we going to put on it?
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Through the efforts of many people - most notably Toby Gibson, Mike Hall, Jarrett Campbell, Scott Henderson, Chris Wilson, Stu Gittelman, Bruce Gilbert, Kirk Lockhart - we assembled a collection of sound clips (in that popular Sun .au format!), images, trivia, discography information, and of course, the Great Lyrics compilation that was originally put together by all these fine folks. We found other locations on the Net that had information that supported Buffettesque lifestyle and philosophy and linked to them and they to us. Soon after Toby and Mike and Jarrett had their own Buffett sites up and a growing Parrothead network was born. Oh yeah, eventually Margaritaville joined the party. :) So we built it. And people came. I would sit in amazement in the office, watching the access log information constantly scroll by on the screen. It was thrilling to see people coming to visit my site from Israel, Iceland, Kuwait, Korea. I was amazed that Jimmy Buffett's appeal reached all around the world. My favorite visitor was Jon Taulbee who was working at US Antarctic Research Base at McMurdo Sound Antartica. |
The site gets about a quarter of a million hits per month and 30-40,000 visitors a month, more during concert season. It has been through several incarations and providers. I'm proud to say it still has a circa 1995 web page look!
Despite the activity, though, I'm ready to pull the plug. Being first doesn't mean being best. There are now so many terrific sources of Buffett information on the Web - a search results in 20,000 pages from AltVista, over 50,000 from Google - that I don't feel as if I'm adding anything new to the mix anymore. There is the Parrothead Web Ring. And of course, the premier site of online Buffett Information, the Church of Buffett, Orthodox.
I don't have the relationships with band members, the historical knowledge or the inside information required to continue to produce a truly worthwhile site. I have always been, and continue to be, just a fan.
If you've enjoyed visiting www.soasoas.com over the years, I'd love to hear from you.
For those of you who value the GLC for the incredible resource that it is, not to worry. It and the rest of the content from this site will be incorporated into the Church of Buffett, Orthodox. (Start changing those bookmarks!)
Thanks to all the great people who contributed to this site. I am grateful for the friendships I have made as a result of this experience - even though I have met very few of you in person!
Finally thanks to Jimmy Buffett, whose music has touched me and inspired me. It's been fun.
Best wishes to all,
