I first came up with the idea for this site back in the fall of 1998. I was sick of people complaining that there was "no good documentation" for accomplishing various things with FreeBSD and FreeBSD in general, so I decided to do something about it.

I registered the domain name in November of 1998, but our first issue wasn't out until January of 1999. This was due to a few things -- I had to design the site, write some articles, and find some other folks to write articles too. Things went pretty smoothly, and our first issue came out around January 15th.

As time went by, the number of articles being submitted varied greatly. Some months we had a huge number of articles, and others I was scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with something to put online. In the summer of 1999, things started looking pretty bad. There wasn't a June issue because there were no articles. In July, there were 12. That was the last issue of 1999. Interest in writing articles seemed to die off in a hurry. In October of 1999, I moved back to California to start working for what was then Walnut Creek CDROM, now BSDi. I got busy with work and didn't have time to maintain the site or pester authors for articles. Then in early 2000, things changed.

Sometime in January, I got an email from Joel Sutton. I knew Joel from being in the FreeBSD community. At the time, he was the President of VicFUG (Victoria FreeBSD User Group) in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. He rallied his VicFUG troops and offered their help in maintaining the site, writing articles, etc. I was pretty happy. Not only would the site be coming back, I'd have someone to help me run it (Joel), and we'd have a steady flow of articles from some of the VicFUG guys (or so we thought). Many of the guys who wrote articles for the first two issues of 2000 got busy with their real jobs, lives, and so on, and didn't have time to keep contributing. This wasn't as big of a blow as it sounds -- by this time, others had started writing articles too, so we still had some coming in.

In June of 2000, Joel resigned as President of VicFUG due to lack of time, but maintained his role as co-editor of the FreeBSD 'zine. Things were going well. Then August 2000 happened. The ISP that the site was hosted at decided to sell, and they gave me six days notice before they were pulling the plug. We weren't prepared for such as disaster to say the least. My roommate came through with some hosting for us on his colocated box, but the PHP and database stuff in use on the site was all horribly broken. At this time, the site was taken offline, and Joel and I decided to start over. We decided we needed our own backend to power the site, and it would be written in PHP. Joel has finished the specs for it (named phpzine), and we should have it implemented in the near future. Jump ahead to December 2000. Here I sit, with the redesigned site. I just finished marking up the articles from the previous issues in 2000, and by the time you're reading this, the site will have gone live yet again.

What does the future hold? I have no idea :-) We'll be doing our best to keep the site up, get new issues out on time, and implement our backend when it's finished in as seamless a fashion as possible. As always, we're more than happy to receive articles, so if you'd like to write one, please do so and then send it to us.

Well, that just about does it for the history of the site. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me and ask :-)

- Jim Mock, Founder