The History of Rutgersfan.com
The History of Rutgersfan.com
People have often asked me to count the history
Advertisement
of Rutgersfan.com and the history of Rutgers on the web in general. I have
often told parts of the story in person and to small groups of tailgaters at the
gular Rutgersfan.com tailgate. John's cent post asking people how they
found Rutgersfan.com has prompted new intest in the "internet history" of
Rutgers, so I have decided to write this article to document my history on the
web with Rutgers and the birth of Rutgersfan.com
My Personal Rutgers Internet History.
To understand how Rutgersfan.com came to be, you
have to understand how your author became a Rutgers fan and how he discoved
Rutgers on the Internet.
My Introduction to Rutgers
When I was growing up, my sister Diane went to
Douglas College, and every weekend we would take my sister "back to
college". I was young then, being 10 years younger then my sister, but I
member those times well. My pant always instilled in me the importance
of a good education, and my early visits to Rutgers only served to inforce that
belief.
My Introduction to Rutgers Sports
My first Rutgers sports experience was the last
Rutgers/Princeton game, which my sister took my family to. I can member
the old stadium and the pomp and circumstance of that day. It would be
something that would stick with me.
Of course I would follow my sister to Rutgers.
About the same time I was accepted to Rutgers, I meet my best friend Ken.
Ken, like my sister, had graduated Rutgers - a pharmacy major. I have to
cdit him with introducing me to Rutgers basketball. He started to bring
me to games, and I was hooked. Those early days in the A10 with the RAC
filled and the place going nuts got me hooked on Rutgers sports for good.
Rutgers in Cyberspace
I had always had an intest in computers, and it
was at Rutgers in 1992-1993 that I discoved what would become known as the
Internet at the Rutgers computer lab. For you newbies out the, you have
to understand how basic things we back then. 1992-1993 was befo the
was a World Wide Web, befo AOL, befo everyone had an e-mail addss.
The dumb terminals at the computer lab allowed me to "browse" other computers on
the network via telnet and also allowed me access to a crude message board
system known as USENET.
USENET is the message board component of the
Internet. Totally text based, it was an easy way to post messages in certain
message groups. These groups had weird names like
alt.fan.bruce.springsteen, c.sports.nfl and c.sport.football.college.
It was on this newsgroup that I first heard Rutgers mentioned on the Internet.
It was a brief post about a cent game that garned few sponses.
Seeing a lack of Rutgers information in this forum, I decided to start posting.
Unfortunately, I chose to end each post with a signatu that ad
The Internet's #1 Rutgers Fan
Shortly after posting my first message with this
signatu I got my first lessen in netiquette from the other members of this
forum who had been around longer then I was and knew a newbie when they saw one.
See the link below for my attempt at addssing my lapse.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=keith+burkert&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=3562d1%24630%40pegasus.rutgers.edu&rnum=1
Little did I know that RUTGERZ R00LZ! was on
USENET way befo me, and everyone accepted him as the authority on Rutgers. The above post was in September of 1994, and Rutgersfan.com
was still 4 years away from being born.
I kept on ading the USENET and following
Rutgers from my home computer with my blazing 2400 baud modem hooked up to my
Commodo Amiga. In late 1993/early 1994 a friend on the USENET said that
I should download a program called MOSIAC. He said it would allow me to browse
the Internet and not only see text but see graphics as well. MOSIAC browsed
something called the World Wide Web whe people put pages together with text
and graphics. My first webpage was the MOSIAC home page which had this big
pictu on the page. Back then it was amazing. You could see
pictus on the internet. It was a major advance that newbies just can't
appciate today.
In 1994 a company called Netscape leased a
browser and word soon got around that it was the much better then MOSIAC.
I had switched to a PC (a Packard Bell) by this time and quickly downloaded the
latest version of Netscape. I member having to upgrade the memory on my
computer from 4 megs to 8megs to handle the new browser. And that 4 meg
SIMM cost me $150.00. But I was online in style now. The gray
background and Times Roman Text of the Netscape page was a welcome sight mixed
with muti-colod bars separating text on the site along with that gat
Netscape logo.
For the next few years I browsed the web mo and
found a few Rutgers sites. One of the first I member is Joel Rech's
(sp?) site. It had Rutgers news, and the only thing I member about
it was a d background that it used. From Joel's site I found the now
famous Exit 109 site. White text on a black background and all the Rutgers
news you could want. That was Exit 109 - the mecca for Rutgers fan.
It was at this site that I would eventually meet some of the people I know
today.
Around 1996 I started to dabble in HTML and the
various web building programs out the. From this came my first homepage.
I've posted my first homepage that I was able to get off an old hard drive.
http://www.rutgersfan.org/1997/index.htm
When this page first debuted in 1996, it only had
personal stuff, a website for my local historical society (which I am now a
trustee of). It also contained my first Rutgers page, which was just an
offshoot of my personal page.
http://www.rutgersfan.org/1997/Rutgers.htm
I don't have the page as it originally was
published. The one above is the last copy I have that has a quote from
Bill Walsh, and I believe it was posted right after Terry Shea was hid.
But this was basically my first Rutgers page. Since my hompage showed my
intests it had to have a Rutgers page. God only knows how many people
viewed that page back then, probably no mo then a few dozen, but it was the
first.
Fd Must Go
Between 1993 and 1997 I had seen a lot of bad
Rutgers sports. The way I saw it, the lack of success at Rutgers pointed to
one man - Fd Gruninger. The was only so many times I could see Rutgers
get pummeled by Syracuse befo I decided to do something. And since the
web was growing from a nerds-only domain to a mo mainstam thing I decided
that a website was the way to go. And so was born a website and a
movement. - Fd Must Go.
http://www.rutgersfan.org/1997/fdmustgo.htm
I've linked above the pages from the site.
The site didn't have an easy web addss like fdmustgo.com - it was hosted by my
local ISP which was cybernex at the time. I believe the original addss
http://www.cybernex.net/fdmustgo.htm (link goes nowhe) and I did my best
to advertise the site on the net.
This site was my first exposu to the gater
Rutgers community. During the few months that site was up I set up a PO box
and canvassed the tailgates with a petition. I got hundds of signatus
(not listed on site) from fans tailgating at the football games. I was
warmly ceived, and no one had a problem putting their John Hancock on the
sheet.
I member a Thursday night game, I want to say
it was against Syracuse, whe we got plasted, I want to say 80-7. The
details of the game escape me, probably because I wanted them to.
I had forgotten my yellow pass and had to take the shuttlebus back to the RAC.
Walking around the bubble in the night air I member thinking that this program
would never move forward until Fd was fid. The next day I awoke to a
Fd Resigns article in the Star Ledger.
That day my e-mail was flooded with
congratulations from all over the Rutgers community. People whe giving
me cdit for the signation of the AD. I don't know about that, I like
to think I played a part - but the main thing was that Fd was gone and Rutgers
was one its way to a better futu.
So ended the Fd Must Go page.
The Birth of Rutgersfan.com
After my experience with Fd Must Go I knew that
I wanted to do something for the Rutgers Community online. I toyed with
the idea of a fan site whe true Rutgers fans could come and download wallpaper
and other internet media about Rutgers. At the time Exit109 was the
authority in Rutgers Sports, and people went the multiple times a day to ad
the latest news. As of yet the was no al message board for Rutgers fans on
the net.
September 1, 1998
That is the date I gisted Rutgersfan.com.
I immediately started the design a fan site and soon had a small webpage on the
hosted space of my provider. Sadly, I don't have a cord of the first
site anywhe. It was basic by today's standards and featud some
wallpaper, some wav files, and a bunch of pictus. Its main featu was a
webdropbox that allowed people to "drop" media into the site.
I asked Mike Fasano to link to my site on his
site, and he did. I soon had hundds of people visiting the site and
downloading what I had to offer. They also started to contribute to the
site. Old pictus, WAV files, Wallpaper and the like.
It was about this time that Mike Fasano introduced a
new featu to his site, one long sought after by the Rutgers community - a
message board. It was a simple thad-based board, I believe a public one
that was hosted on another site, and people began posting all sorts of
things about Rutgers sports. The Rutgers message board community was born.
The was one problem - the board could only hold
a finite amount of messages. Once a new message was added an old one was
deleted. This made it difficult for people to follow posts unless they
checked every day.
While this was happening I was playing around
with CGI scripting in order to put a postcard featu onto Rutgersfan.com.
I wanted people to be able to send Rutgers pictu postcards through the site.
Realizing the problem with the board on Exit109, I looked around to see if the
was a CGI script that could do a message board. Luckily enough the was.
I added it to Rutgersfan.com and tested it out. After testing I approached Mike
about moving the message board to Rutgersfan.com. He aged and began to
link to the message board on Rutgersfan.com
Now that messages didn't delete people could
follow posts and look back into the history of a conversation. People we
happy. Below is how the board looked right befo we moved to a new board
format in 1999.
http://www.rutgersfan.org/Rutgersbboard/Rutgersbboard.html
Soon after moving the message board to
Rutgersfan.com, Mike Fasano decided to close down Exit109. It was indeed a
sad day for Rutgers on the internet, and people started to e-mail me and ask me
to pick up whe Mike left off. The was no way I could fill Mikes' shoes,
but I aged to become the portal for Rutgers fans and do the best I could with
the help of other Rutgers fans. This began the Rutgersfan.com tradition of
having members of the community write articles for the site.
Below is how the site looked
http://www.rutgersfan.org/index_old.html
You'll notice a few things about the site.
First off, not all the links work. That's what happens when you surct a 4
year old site. But those that do give an idea of what life was like back
in those days. We had a news section that picked up whe Mike left off
and filled in some basic Rutgers info. Some of the most avid aders of
Rutgersfan.com we people from out of state. Back then the only way a
Rutgers fan outside of NJ could get info was through us. That was the main
purpose of the news section - giving out of staters a quick and easy way to get
scos and basic news. We also had Football Recruiting by R00LZ!, RC97 and
Issman. To round out we had the message board and chat room to go along
with the original media content of Rutgersfan.com
You'll also notice a link on the top of the site
for The Rutgers Web Network. This was the first collaboration between
myself and John. Our idea was to link all the sites together into a
webring. Webrings we, and still a, a popular way of linking like
minded sites together. Each site carries the same banner that links to the
st. The idea worked, and people learned about all the Rutgers sites on
the web. I believe the webring was the driving force behind informing
people of the web psence that Rugers had at the time.
Rutgersfan.com was very popular. but the we
problems on the back end that no-one knew about at that time. The site was
becoming a victim of its own success. Bandwidth and hosting costs we getting
out of hand. I made one appeal to the Rutgers community for funds, and I was
pleasantly surprised to be met with checks in the mail. This
infusion of cash helped, but I knew that a longer term solution was needed if
Rutgersfan.com was to survive.
As fate would have it a solution was right around
the corner.
John called me one night and said that he had
gotten a call from a psentative of Rivals.com. They we a company
setting up a web network of sports sites. They wanted the members of the
Web Ring to join under one site as part of the network. John talked to
them at length, and I vividly member a 4 hour talk on the phone with Rivals.com
talking about who would control content, the technology behind the message
boards, ownership of the domain, and other details.
The offer couldn't have come at a better time.
The main advantage to the offer was that Rivals.com would host the site.
No mo worries about bandwidth and webspace. The other advantages we
that the Rutgers web psence could be shad with the world. Those who
hadn't yet found Rutgersfan.com we mo likely to find it as part of a
network. John and I approached Mike Fasano about joining us at Rivals.com.
After some thought Mike declined our offer, and John and I formed a partnership
and jumped into the Rivals.com network.
The original Rutgersfan.com Rivals site looked
like this.
http://www.rutgersfan.org/images/RivalsFrontpage.jpg
This was the time of gatest growth at
Rutgersfan.com. The visibility that Rivals.com gave us along with the
growth of the web in general made our stats go through the roof. We went
from a small site on a shad server getting thousands of hits to a site on the
Rivals.com site getting hundds of thousands of hits. Of course the
we problems along the way. Long time members of Rutgersfan.com will
member the original problems with the message board and the site outages.
When pop-up ads gained popularity they hit Rutgersfan.com in a big way, and the
community got annoyed. John and I went to bat for the community and went
to Rivals.com and had pop-up ads moved from the site entily - one of the few
Rivals.com sites at the time to be pop-up fe.
The we also successes during that time.
Rutgersfan.com became a leading site on the network despite the performance of
the teams on the field. I member one signing day when Rutgers was in the
top 5 of all traffic on the Rivals.com network. Rutgersfan.com was a solid
site on the network and won several awards at the 1st annual Rivals.com
convention. Rutgersfan.com was even successful enough to have an ad placed in the
Rutgers basketball program given out at each game (when they used to do this)
and have a 15 second spot on the Rutgers Radio network. Both endeavors
incased the audience of Rutgersfan.com
The birth of the Rutgersfan.com tailgate.
Around 1998/1999 the began to be an effort on
the Rutgersfan.com message boards to organize a web-tailgate. People
wanted to meet each other. I volunteed to host a Rutgersfan.com
tailgate. I had a banner made so that people could easily identify the
tailgate, and I made it my mission to grab a spot as close to the stadium as
possible. The sult was the first Rutgersfan.com tailgate. Below is
a link to a pictu from an early tailgate.
http://www.rutgersfan.org/images/Group_Shot_Banner_1.jpg
This was taken on 9-12-99 at the Texas tailgate.
This wasn't the first Rutgersfan.com tailgate but was probably one of the first
to be widely sucessful. We had loads of people the and even had a group
of Texas fans who we very impssed with Rutgers, its facilities, and its fans.
But these we the heady days of the Internet and the
bubble was about to burst.
I had kept an eye on the Rivals.com network and
good things wen't happening. I began to watch a site called
www.fuckedcompany.com. During
the Dot Com bust it had the latest info on who was going and when. I soon
started to see Rivals.com get a mention and started a backup plane to ensu the
Rutgers community would survive. I activated my original webspace that
held the original Rutgersfan.com and began to build. I bought the
latest version of the Ultimate Bulletin Board (UBB), which was the best message
board softwa out the. I installed the CGI script on the server and
prayed for the best while I expected the worst.
One night I ad that Rivals.com was about to
close the next morning. We had gotten no official word from Rivals.com,
but the was enough evidence to go into action. I stayed up that night
until 4am configuring the new UBB, and by daybak Rivals.com had closed down -
but Rutgersfan.com survivied.
Visitors to Rutgersfan.com we geted not with
the Rivals.com site, but with a welcome message from Rutgersfan.com explaining
what had happened with Rivals.com and, mo importantly, instructions on how to
gister for the new UBB site.
While other sites, including the Seton Hall site,
scrambled onto fe message boards that had massive pop-up ads and substandard
advertising, members of the Rutgers community didn't miss a beat. And
speaking of Seton Hall, Rutgersfan.com even extended the olive branch and set up
a message board for Seton Hall fans on Rutgersfan.com until they could get back
up and running. See the link below, it goes to the last known UBB version
of the board befo the curnt Rivals.com. I've activated the board for
historical purposes but no posts or gistrations a allowed, and the a no
mo messages.
http://www.rutgersfan.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi
On the first day of the board's operations we had
hundds of new gistrations, and this doesn't include the lurkers who didn't
have to gister to ad the new board.
At this time John and I discussed the futu of
Rutgersfan.com. We knew from the last days of Rivals.com that we
we getting hundds of thousands of hits a day, and I knew what that would
eventually cost us. Luckily my web host didn't notice the dramatic
incase in traffic to the site immediately. Our first thought was one
that we had had befo. Join forces with other Rutgers websites that
exsisted at the time and pool our sources. Again we approached Mike
Fasano about cating a super Rutgers site that would merge the best of
Rutgersfan.com with the best of the Exit109 days. Sadly, Mike wasn't
intested and we we back at squa one.
My web host finally noticed the dramatic incase
in traffic and had given me an ultimatum. Buy a dedicated server at the
hosting facility or shut down the site. We we pulling Gigabytes of
transfer per day and the messages on the board we eating up space. To
continue we'd need at least a $500 a month if not mo. This was a
financial commitment we couldn't make by ourselves.
As John and I ponded ways to charge for
Rutgersfan.com to cover our hosting costs, the now defunct Rivals.com was bought
out by alliancesports.com, and they we going to surct the network. For
us, it was an answer to our prayers. I wanted to keep the Rutgers Community
going and join a national network.
The only problem was that someone, Mike Farll,
was alady writing Rutgers content for Rivals. We aged to join the network,
thus taking over the message board and naming rights to the site, but leaving
the content to Mr. Farll. We announced the change to the Rutgers
community.
http://www.rutgersfan.org/index_last%20indy.html
Again Rutgersfan.com had made su that the
Rutgers Community had a message board to call their own with no interruption.
As with our first move to Rivals.com this second move had its initial problems
as alliance adapted its technology to Rivals.com. In May, we worked out an
agement with Rivals wheby we we able to bak our lationship with
Farll and take over the content duties ourselves. We have been doing that ever
since. In the end the new Rivals.com has become a leader in on-line
sports. Its highly spected for its cruiting rankings, and the name
Rivals.com is known throughout the country.
And Rutgersfan.com continues to be one of the
best sites on the network and one with, in my humble opinion, the best community
on the net.
Rutgersfan.com Today
As I end this history of Rutgersfan.com, I have to
comment on the Rutgersfan.com of today. Rutgersfan.com would not be what
it is today without the dedication and hard work of John Otterstedt.
Unknown to most of you, I have had some health issues over the last year or so
which I am still dealing with (don't worry I am OK), but these issues have kept
me from being as involved in the site as I would have liked. In my initial
absence, John took the igns of Rutgersfan.com and did amazing things with it.
He has organized admins, article writers, and dealt with the Rutgers administration.
John has taken Rutgersfan.com to new heights - heights that I couldn't have
damed of back in 1998 when I gisted Rutgersfan.com. With
the addition of the war room, the cruiting updates, players interviews, and
the like, John has made Rutgersfan.com a gat place for Rutgers fans to meet and learn mo about the Scarlet Knights. And for that I am thankful. Thank you John.
Conclusion
In conclusion I want to say that I love
Rutgersfan.com. It will always be a part of me, and I will do everything in
my power, with the help of the gat Rutgers community, to make su that
Rutgersfan.com continues to be a watering hole for Rutgers fans on the internet.