About Ninjalane - Website History

Here is a breakdown of Ninjalane highlights over the years including how we got started and even why the site went dormant for over a year.

Ninjalane first went online October 10, 1999 and started as an experiment in web programming and design.  At the time I was working as a web designer and team lead for a local web development company (TNG for the locals reading this).  The firm was a Microsoft shop so most everything we built was running on IIS, with Access databases (sometimes MS SQL) and Classic ASP (it wasn't called "classic" back then) .  The company focused on small to mid-sized firms looking for network support and/or websites.  The only problem with catering to small to mid-sized firms is that they had a hard time thinking of the "big picture" and typically do business on a regional level.  Another issue was that none of them had any money and/or were unwilling to spend it.  As a result many of the sites I built were what we called "business card sites" or small one to two page website that didn't do anything except say "Hey, we have a website"

The work was fun, but I needed a creative outlet that figured my efforts might double as a resume site for when I wanted to move on.  The first Ninjalane site was actually a forum (the first Ninjalane Message Forum) written in "Classic" ASP that I later modified extensively to add some better features, counts, and whatnot.

The first official Ninjalane site was born.  The site was written using Classic ASP with the majority of the pages being static in nature.  Actually the only dynamic section was the news.  The news section featured a public form to allow anyone to post stuff to the site.  (Actually very similar to what digg does, had I only knew)  Workflow was enabled in the admin section so I could keep tabs on what was being posted and either approve the story or remove it from the system.  Btw these early posts still exist in the current Ninjalane database however getting to them from the current website is another story.

The first Ninjalane was built using with many of the design practices found in 2000 which consisted of graphic intensive HTML pages with very little attention to CSS.  As the site grew in popularity I added more CSS centric features including the ability for a user to change the graphics and color theme on the fly.  JavaScript still was not widely supported so most of this was handled behind the scenes with ASP. 

The first article was posted.
This article was a casemod project designed to increase airflow in the tower I was using at the time. I posted the article in several forums and got some good feedback. Well some good, some was bad, and some were mean. The casemod itself was a partial failure but that is beside the point.

The first "official" Ninjalane Message Forum hit the web, this was a Classic ASP forum from before based on the UBB.  I upgraded this forum several times over the years until it was replaced by PHPBB in 2003.  On a side note while the Ninjalane Message Forum has never one of the more popular features of Ninjalane it does have the benefit of at least one very loyal and active member since its inception in 2000,  Thanks Jimmy, keep up the good work!