I’ve been so busy lately that this slipped my mind: April 1st was wonko.com’s 10th birthday. Here’s some useless trivia to celebrate the occasion:
- The domain name wasn’t my idea. It was a birthday present from Mom on my 16th birthday.
- WonkoSlice, which was born sometime around April 1st, was a clone of Slashdot (which was big back then) that I built as an excuse to learn ASP.
- WonkoSlice was originally hosted on my desktop PC running Windows 98 and Microsoft Personal Web Server, a toy version of IIS that was limited to 10 simultaneous connections. Traffic quickly became too much for PWS to handle, so within a few months I upgraded to a beta version of Windows 2000 Server.
- Before the site was moved to a dedicated machine, I would often take it down for an hour or two so I could boot Windows 98 to play Quake or Half-Life. Nobody ever complained.
- During the height of the dot-com bubble, a few advertising and blog network startups made attempts to “purchase” WonkoSlice in return for phantom stock. None of them exist anymore.
- wonko.com became my personal blog on February 11, 2003, with this post.
If you’re really interested, I posted a more detailed account of wonko.com’s early history back in 2006.