On May 21, 1999 at 06:23:21 EST, digitalflood.com came to life. Like the birth of most things both wondrous and mediocre, it was mostly unnoticed by the masses. Slowly over the years we’ve evolved from our early “Everything/Nothing” blog format to a multimedia art project to many things to many people. We explore multimedia in many forms: print/graphic art, prose, poetry, short stories, photography, pen & ink, originally composed music pieces, video, and everything in between. We’ve done web casts of radio shows and pushed out mix tapes that are the envy of many a DJ. We’ve drawn rave reviews and mass acclaim. We’ve also drawn controversy, started arguments that have led to literal fist fights, and offended oh so many people. In short, this is what we do and while opinions may very we do it well enough to keep drawing viewers back in– that’s as close to success you can get in the 30 second Twitter One Day; My Space the Next attention span that is web viewership.
On May 21, 2009 we passed the decade mark. DigitalFl00d Studios itself goes back beyond the 1999. We started in print and cassette tape format back in 1994. Our content was delivered by hand a select (and admittedly small) viewership. We migrated to our first web pages that were homed on home brewed servers in 1997. In 1999 we finally got our own domain. Somewhere around 2004 we jumped to our hosting and now we find ourselves on our own server. The site has grown from it’s original 2MB of disk usage to over 3GB (some 2.5GB alone in MP3 format).
To celebrate our decade of web life, I decided we should do something special in late 2008. I began work on researching a new digitalflood.com framework to birth version 11 (which you see here now in beta form). In February 2009 I began finalizing the underlying CMS engine and decided the only way to achieve what I really wanted required its own dedicated server format. That lead to an initial machine build and alpha launch in April 2009. I ended up scrapping most of the early work and nothing jelled until May 2009 when I finalized the look/feel overview.
The more brutal work then began– I had to populate content and migrate it from the old hand coded HTML into the blogging engine. That took most of the Summer of 2009. Just before launch a fatal flaw was found in the CMS engine that had to be patched and then I had some issues cleaning up the dynamic database to move the content from the test web site domain name to the final digitalflood.com one we all know and love.
The result is I am five months late with version 11, but as you can see even from this early public release it is well worth the wait.
On the right hand side during the beta (in other words I’m still ironing some bugs out and cleaning up the old content) you’ll find our known issues. This will let you know what I know is broken. Of course if you find something not in this list you are welcome to drop a line. My goal is to be in public final version 11.0 release for the site in time for 1/1/10.
This will include a new season of Pirate Radio (wait till you see what we have in store for you… mawahahahah) starting in October 2009.
Again, I thank you for checking in and coming back. Like many times before, it’s been awhile since I’ve delivered the goods; but the wait is always worth it. Great things are ahead. More will be offended. More will be pleased. History will continue to be written and digitalflood.com itself march ahead. Enjoy the ride, but remember to keep your arms in the bus at all times.
