A Timeline
(by Kathie Fry)
1996 - Bought My First Skates
This is about the time I skated for the first time.
A very good friend of mine,
Marcel Georgi,
convinced me to take a skating lesson at
Rollerblade's
Bladeschool in Southern California. My instructor
that day was
Andrew Hampshire,
and he must have
done a fantastic job because that night I bought myself
a rather expensive pair of skates and spent the rest of my
life (so far) skating nearly very day.
1997 - Learned to Build Web Pages
Until 1997, I had never done any kind
of Web site development, and I had never
even heard of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language).
About this time, I decided to teach myself
to build Web pages so I could volunteer
to build an internal Web site for a local
National Public Radio Station (US NPR)
-
KCRW
in Santa Monica, California.
From 1997
to 1999 I volunteered at that radio station
15 or 20 hours a week. During those two years I learned
HTML and polished my skills.
1998 - SkateGRRL is Born at AOL
About this time, I decided to take advantage
of the 5 MB of free Web site space
AOL
gives
their subscribers, and build a simple Web site
to organize all of my skating bookmarks. At
this point, I had
nearly 1000 Web sites bookedmarked on my
computer and organized into folders. It made
sense (since I had learned HTML) to make them
more accessible to me and my friends by
creating a Web page for them. So I created
an AOl Web page with all of my skating links organized by topic,
I named the site "SkateGRRL" because that was my AOL name
at the time
(I had to stop using that name because it was my
experience that any AOL name with "GRRL"
in it, was subject to constant abuse by AOL hackers).
1999, April - Reserved SkateGRRL.com
One of my friends convinced me to
purchase the domain name skategrrl.com
so no one else could reserve it.
Skategrrl was my AOL name,
and the name of the AOL Web page where
I had organized all of my skating links.
1999, May - SkateGRRL.com is Born
After I had purchased the domain name skategrrl.com,
I decided I might as well find out what it would
take to have a "real" Web site. I found out
that it could be done rather easily and the cost
was not prohibitive. So I purchased web hosting
services and transferred my AOL Web site to
http://www.skategrrl.com
1999, June - First Contact from About.com
SkateGRRL.com had only been online one month,
when someone from
About.com
contacted me. They said they liked the way
SkateGRRL was organized, and they
and asked if I would be interested in building
and hosting an inline skating site for them. At first
I thought they were spamming me - "get rich quick..
build a web site for About.com". But then some
of my
friends explained that About.com was one of the
largest and most popular sites on the Internet,
and they really *did* hire people to create
and maintain topic-specific Web sites. so I
decided to try it! This was the first time I
ever considered becoming the webmaster of a public
Web site. Before this, the idea had never even
crossed my mind.
1999 - About Inline Skating Goes Live
On September 1, 1999, the inline skating Web site I host and
edit for About.com went live for the first time at
http://InlineSkating.about.com.
I spent the first three months working frantically
to add content to the site, and I spent many lonely nights in
my chat room. After those first three months, I started seeing
significant hits on the site and people started actually
showing up at some of my scheduled chat sessions.
2000 - Learning the Ropes
I spent the first year of my About.com site
adding content and learning to
be the webmaster of a very large Internet Web site.
Working as a "Guide" for About.com was the very best
webmaster training I could have possibly received.
They taught me very well, because
In one year, my About.com
site went from receiving zero page views a day
to receiving many thousands of page views a day,
and it become one of the highest ranked sites at
About.com.
2001 - August - Open Directory Skating Editor
The people at the
Open Directory Project
agreed to let me edit their inline skating link directory.
It took two years to convince them! (becoming the ODP editor
of a top-level topic is not always easy...)
A few weeks after I started working with
ODP, they agreed to merge their inline skating
and roller skating categories, so now I am editing the Dmoz.com
Roller Skating Open Directory
which includes links for both inline skating
and quad roller skating.
ABOUT ODP: Open Directory is a public domain link library that is available free
to any Web site. The ODP link library also appears in the search
results for Google, AOL, Netscape, and many other search engines.
2001 October - New Domain Names
I decided I would soon be ready to move to the
next level of Webmasterdom, so I purchased
several new domain names for future development:
At some point in the future,
I might move SkateGRRL.com
to AskAboutSkating.com, because
sometimes people tell me SkateGRRL sounds
too much like a site for girl skaters.
But I have not made that decision yet
and I have not decided what I will
do with the other domain names I purchased.
2002, March - Zeal.com Skating Editor
I became the inline skating and quad roller skating
editor for Zeal.com, which is the link directory
used by LookSmart.com and several other search engines.
I am hoping to convince Zeal to combine these directories
at some time in the future because most (but of course not all)
of the links I am adding are appropriate for both types of skating.
2002, June - A SkateGRRL.com Newsletter
The first issue of the SkateGRRL.com newsletter
was sent on June 20, 2002.
Kathie Today
SkateGRRL.com
I am continuing to work on a major redesign
and expansion of SkateGRRL.com that was started near the
end of 2001. It will probably take me
the rest of of 2002 to finish this job, because I want to
really polish up the entire site.
Open Directory and Zeal.com
I am in the process of cleaning
up and updating the Open Directory and Zeal.com skating link libraries,
a job that will probably also take most of 2002 to complete.
If only I could get my hands on the Yahoo skating directory!
About.com
I am still hosting and editing About.com's skating
site, and the job is very rewarding - in large part
because I use all of the money they pay me to skate
in many different countries, so I can meet
skaters from everywhere,
take photos, and write about my experiences.
My Personal Life (what IS a date anyway......)
I spend at least five day a week working at my "real"
job - which I still love - and
almost all of my evenings and weekends working on my Web sites.
You can probably guess this does not leave much time
for socializing.
I have made a firm decision that NEXT year I will free
up more time for fun and parties and games. I know I know... I said
that last year... and the year before...
and the year before that...
But before you begin feeling too sorry for me,
and start thinking about which skater or
webmaster you should try to hook me up with,
I should explain that
the situation is really
not nearly as bleak as it sounds. Every few weeks I will turn
off my computer and lock up my home and run away from all
of my work to
skate in some exotic place around the world. Some of my recent skating holidays
have been to Havana, Mallorca, Helsinki, Lausanne, Stockholm,
St. Petersburg, Pushkin, San Francisco, Copenhagen,
Trieste, Oostend, and probably a few more places that
do not immediately come to mind. So you can see
my social life is either feast or famine.
But either way, my life is very good!
Cooking Up Stuff:
Don't ask me why (I know I have plenty to do)
but for some reason I
am feeling ready this year to dive into some
completely new and exciting projects.
I am definitely interested in
pursuing any good opportunities that present themselves.
One thing I am exploring is the possibility
of created some significant new sports and fitness Web sites.
I am also considering
teaming up with other individuals, Web sites,
companies, or organizations to
start up some new (you'll have to wait and see!) projects
in the future.
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