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The Launch of Our First Resource Sites
(As told by Pedro Pequeno, our Founder)
The real story began back in 1996 when I first fell in love with Web Development and Perl/CGI-scripting. Web development seemed to take everything that I enjoyed and put it in one tightly bound package. I loved programming, I loved graphics, and I loved the instant gratification of being able to create something useful within hours that could be shared instantly with the whole world. This was in stark contrast to my other interest at the time, which was electronic circuit design. Creating a successful circuit could take weeks of prototyping, had little graphical appeal and was difficult to distribute to others.
Back in those days, my favorite web application was a well known forum app called Gossamer Threads Forum, which is still available today. I would spend hours upon hours creating mods for Gossamer Threads and tweaking the graphical layout. At the time, the purpose of all this tweaking was to improve the message board on a small community website I ran called eFair.com - “The Electrical Fairgrounds”. This was a website that shared electronic circuit designs with the community of hobbyists.
In mid 1998, I started experimenting with other web development languages that were just emerging onto the scene. One of those languages was ASP (Active Server Pages). Back then Microsoft was still somewhat in vogue and their ASP platform was the second most popular platform after CGI.
Later that year, I realized that while there were some great resource websites for CGI, there was nothing for ASP. Seeing the need, and driven by my passion for web development, I got two of my best friends (Tony D. and Manny D.) fired up about creating the web’s first ASP resource directory and asked them to help me build it. The only problem was that none of us had a ton of experience with ASP. I had tinkered with it myself, but I was still a far cry away from being able to create a full-blown web application with it. That was a bit of a setback, yes, but we were optimistic that our previous experience with Perl/CGI scripting would carry us through.
First things first, we bought ourselves a copy of Wrox's Professional ASP 2.0 book and ventured off into the world of ASP scripting. Meanwhile, we all worked on picking a website name and a company name... we picked Aspin.com – The ASP Resource Index as the website name. That domain name was picked because it was a nice short hand for “ASP Index” and was a cool word-play on the famous mountain range and ski resort destination. The company name actually took us more work to pick than the website name. In the end, we decided on “InfoGenius” based on the idea that we wanted to be the best at managing information and information technology.
Unfortunately, shortly after the project got started, my two friends decided they needed to duck out of the project so they could concentrate on their other priorities. Undaunted, I forged on with Aspin.com.
At the time, I was in my senior year of college at Penn State University in my final semester of Electrical Engineering (Spring 1999). A typical day that semester started at about 10:00AM with my first Engineering class. Even though I barely made it to that class, I was grateful because it was the only thing motivating me to get up that darn early in the morning (remember, I was on student hours)! Between 10AM and 4PM, I usually had about 4 classes... let’s just say that I really tried to make it to at least half of them. My lab mates didn't really appreciate it but I kissed butt as much as possible so they would pick up some of my lab work (thanks Brian A. and Brian T.). After my classes for the day, I would return back to my dorm and glue myself to my PC until about 4 AM. Eating and Sleeping were usually second priority to coding. I ended up losing about fifteen pounds that semester, which was good for attracting more ladies… but unless they were going to help me code, I really didn't pay them much attention.
On March 1st, 1999, about three months after I had started designing the first layouts and concept for the site, I released Aspin.com to the world. The site’s traffic grew steadily over time and before I knew it, the site was serving up one million page-views per month! Rather than stopping there, I and the rest of the crew who had joined me decided to take the concept to other web development communities like JavaServer Pages with our Jspin.com site, Web Services with our RemoteMethods.com site and ASP.NET with our 411ASP.net site.
Of course, we had always wanted to create a CGI and PHP resource site but we didn’t want to encroach on our sister company’s websites run by Matt Wright (at cgi-resoruces.com and later renamed to ResourceIndex.com). During those years, we shared the “Resource Index” phrase in our website’s names. Matt was an inspiration to many of us early web developers and deserved our respect for all the work he had done fostering those early resource communities. We thank Matt for this and for his open friendship with us.
As we now move into the future and open up a new chapter in our history with the launch of Codango, I want to thank the millions of web developers around the world who have been avid user of our resource sites and made this journey with us. From us all here at Codango, THANK YOU! We look forward to many more years of serving this wonderful community.
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