Outpost Gallifrey: Legacy

Outpost Gallifrey is eight years old in December 2003. In web years, that's a lifetime... years in a time period measured in a span less than a decade. Much of the early history of the website was lost to my memory... until the summer of 2001, when I bought a house, discovered a number of cases of diskettes and old ZIP disks that I'd forgotten about, and realized that in my mind-numbing quest to keep my work backed-up, I had the entire history of Outpost Gallifrey on computer.

The Outpost legacy is one of dramatic change. It started in December 1995 as a test site for my own creativity, and was spurred on by the reason for which the Outpost still exists today: as a home page for the Gallifrey conventions. In the interim, it developed a life of its own, including material that hasn't been seen online for many years; graphics I'd thought I'd forgotten; and an entire track of non-Doctor Who content... a well-received Star Trek news page, a Babylon 5 news page that executive producer J. Michael Straczynski read regularly, and even a Red Dwarf page that never seemed to be kept fully up to date.

Here now, I present the legacy of Outpost Gallifrey -- a history of a website that has been my obsession for many years.

outpost 0.5
1995 - Early 1996

And so it began... my first attempt at web design. I was the Forum Administrator of the CompuServe Science Fiction & Fantasy Media Forums at the time, and I remember listening to my friends Matt Mitchell and Steve Smyth talking about this new 'world wide web' thing that I couldn't quite get a handle on. When CompuServe opened up its own unique web space, ourworld, I remember immediately jumping in with their own home page 'creator' software and starting.

The name "Outpost" came to me almost on a lark; I remember vaguely wanting to call this Outpost Gallifrey and doing a Deep Space Nine site called Outpost Bajor that never surfaced. It was to be a home site for Los Angeles fandom, and of course to promote the forthcoming Gallifrey 1996 convention and our local club, the Time Meddlers of Los Angeles. Late in the game, I remember involving Ken Barr of the newly-created Ambrosia Comics & Collectibles, the mail-order business he'd created in the supply room of his current business, the KopyKat printing company.

Despite mention for years to the contrary, I did not "take over" the Doctor Who News Page in 2000. The news started on my own page, as "Intergalactic Enquirer Online," the online version of the Time Meddlers' news column Notebook Gallifrey that I'd been writing since the late 1980's. While I may have inherited the actual title "Doctor Who News Page" from Mark Phippen, who got it from Shannon Patrick Sullivan, Outpost Gallifrey always featured a news page, from its very beginning. I was quite proud of it too.

Looking at the site, there are a number of things that were central in those early days that no longer exist -- the Tales from the Dwarfside homepage, which was the page for the Red Dwarf fiction 'zine that Matt and I created for the Time Meddlers; and my own homepage, "Shaun's Page," which I seemed to have lost somewhere in the interim. I don't recall why it was dropped, though. Funnily enough, the page from February 1996 -- the month I put a counter on the website, for which I'm still counting today -- talks about opposing the Communications Decency Act, and there's this little button about "Free Speech Online". Ah, young crusaders...

Why 0.5? To be honest, the whole thought of numbering the iterations of my site didn't come until much later. This wasn't really the Outpost itself, more a sort of hollow shell waiting to be filled. It wasn't until the next generation of site that it really came into fruition...

outpost 1.0
Mid 1996 - Early 1997

And so, the Outpost truly began. "The Website of L.A. Doctor Who Fandom" began to take off in 1996 around the launch of the Doctor Who TV movie. Featured heavily in our advertising post-convention at Gallifrey 1996, and in our mailings done to promote the Directors Guild of America movie launch (the work we did for which is mentioned in Philip Segal & Gary Russell's book Regeneration), people started taking an active interest in the website. This was the era I launched the "Canon Keeper's Guide to Doctor Who," an organized list of Doctor Who stories incorporating the 'expanded universe' of the Doctor Who novels. At the time, I even did some parodies of New Adventures like had been done at other sites online; these were taken from the pages of the Time Meddlers of Los Angeles newsletter Intergalactic Enquirer that I was still editing at the time, and seemed to be quite popular. Some of the articles from those days made it onto the site as well, including Eric Hoffman's salute to Jon Pertwee (who passed away in mid-1996) and the Deep Space Nine Season Four Episode Guide.

The News page really began to kick during this time. Quotes from my Red Dwarf, Star Trek and Babylon 5 news were beginning to be featured on other websites; the Founders Home Page (a European DS9 site) quoted from us, and JMS, the producer of B5, started taking an interest in some of the things we were reporting. Gosh, it's hard to imagine the Outpost having non-Who content on it right now...

I remember when I introduced the black theme, with the starfield. At the time, I hated black text on white background and I thought this REALLY gave a kick to the site. Other people seemed to agree; there were many complaints when I took the whole thing toward the way it is today in 1999 with the 2.0 upgrade.

I was having more fun than I could imagine when I was doing Outpost in these days. Everything was so bright and colorful on a black background; lots of rainbow colors, lots of experimenting with PC Paintbrush 2.0 and the early Paint Shop Pro. And this was when our convention became truly noticed by the rest of the Doctor Who fan community -- before 1996, we were just a local event, but after the film and Gallifrey's part in its evolution, we were really on the upswing. I miss those days.

outpost 1.5
Mid 1997 - Early 1999

The Black Years. Surprisingly, this was the time period I kept the least amount of detail -- somewhere between my weaning from the use of floppy discs and before my purchase of a CD burner in January 2000. (I'd kept backups on ZIP disks at the time, but of course they were so expensive I ended up recycling them.) The unfortunate fact is, this is when the Outpost became popular, and I have very little to show for it. Needless to say I'm not terribly pleased about that.

The 1.5 years was when the News Page took off. I don't quite know what Shannon Patrick Sullivan had thought of it at the time; Shannon ran the DW News Page then. Since then, Shannon and I have become very good online friends, and are on mailing lists together. I split the News Page into many sections -- the Doctor Who news had its own page, Star Trek its own, Babylon 5, Red Dwarf and so forth. There was the Science Fiction Media & TV page; in the only archive I possess from the year 1998 (May) there is a preview of the Sci-Fi Channel's Fall Schedule. These were the news snippets I regularly featured in the Time Meddlers newsletter. For over a year, I also hosted a mirror of my good friend Lee Whiteside's very popular SFTV Schedules (he still does them today!) and a running news article by Ken Barr of Ambrosia called "Ken's Korner" (a comic news series that also featured in the Meddler newsletter). There was also the beginning of a column I wanted to continue called "The Who-File" by a guy named Chad Knueppe, who has since become a friend as well.

The Club directory, the Audio/Video Directory and the Convention Calendar all began during this time. There was a full convention history of Gallifrey One online, pulled when we decided to do a book (and since the book's been canceled, it'll eventually make its way back onto the site... heck, most of this is probably going to end up back on the Outpost at some point!) Most importantly, a few pages of book listings began the long road toward the Outpost Reference Guide, which I'm very fond of today.

For a time, there were varied color themes... one featured a reddish-purple Outpost Gallifrey logo using the Babylon 5 Serpentine font. For the longest time there was a marbled lilac strip down the left side, my heydays with Web page frames. I put a lot of work into Javascript menus as well; there was a menu once that looked like a big floating graphic, and if you moved the cursor over it, there was a little red arrow that appeared. That was waaaaaay cool.

I left CompuSevrve during this time, hosting the page at Concentric (formerly CRIS). Some vestiges of the old address www.concentric.net/~jslyon can still be seen around the Net. In mid 1997, I decided to register www.gallifreyone.com and kept it hosted at Concentric; the web address is still the one I use. (I had to decide whether or not to use gallifreyone.com or outpostgallifrey.com -- we went with the former because Gallifrey Conventions agreed at the time to pay for half of the yearly operation. Gallifrey indeed paid for half of the website until the end of 1999.) Gone, however, are the original guestbooks which were taken over by Lycos and then treated shoddily.

Looking back is very difficult... no, I'm not talking nostalgia. I'm talking about the colors. How hard on the eyes, the Outpost was! Times New Roman font in bright neon colors on a black background. I must have been crazy. Still, I wish I had more of this era in my archives.

outpost 2.0
Mid 1999

From black backgrounds to the stability of solid color. I remember thinking for months that I really began to hate the black background, and was looking for something, anything, to get rid of it. So one day, I'm sitting at work (I spent an awful lot of time updating the Outpost at my job back then!) and I happen to browse to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office of the Government of the United Kingdom... and there I had my new site. Okay, plagiarism is a no-no and I would never steal any content... but the design was very cool, if a little bit convoluted. There were deep colors in their backgrounds -- a very awesome bluish-gray, a nice deep lavender and a very explosive red, all of which served for about four months as the backgrounds for the new architecture. I worked day and night, creating new buttons that would glow when the cursor knocked over them, and spent hours trying to figure out how to render lens flare using Photoshop to the proper setting. Soon, I had Outpost 2.0. And, sadly, I promptly fell out of love with it within weeks.

Outpost 2.0 had some neat stuff. There were flashy little arrows on the Recent Updates list, still and always stuck to one side; there were active frame pages controlled by both the top menu across the screen and the submenus down the left side that changed as people clicked on them. But soon I started getting complaints that it was too complicated, that it didn't make any sense. My grand experiment was failing, and although I received a few accolades, this wasn't a popular time for the Outpost.

This era also brought to a conclusion my history with non-Doctor Who related content. While the Star Trek and Babylon 5 news pages stuttered along until the end of the year, well into the next iteration, the Red Dwarf and SF news pages were wrapped up, and the SFTV schedule mirror from Lee Whiteside was ended. On the other hand, this era brought the launch of Benjamin Elliott's "This Week in Doctor Who" which for several years I hosted a popular mirror of; as well as a mirror of Paul Harman's extremely popular "Web Guide to Doctor Who". I also created the Outpost Bookstore, an affiliation with Amazon.com and the now-defunct Friends of Doctor Who/800-TREKKER group.

A quite funny story, while this version of the Outpost was unpopular even with its editor, it was the hardest to get rid of! The reviews section was so meticulously reconstructed for this iteration that I didn't want to even bother with changing it! So for over a year, while the rest of the Outpost got its next change, the individual Reviews pages still retained their haphazard tan background coloring and funky font usage. The last vestiges of Outpost 2.0, in the individual reviews pages, didn't disappear fully from the site until early 2001!

outpost 3.0
Mid 1999 - Early 2001

The Outpost slowly started becoming the site of today in the latter half of 1999. While the current iteration of the site is quite popular, I'd hasten to say that Outpost 3.0 and its 3.5 successor were the most universally-lauded versions. Gone was the awful colored backgrounds of 2.0 or the inky blackness of its predecessor; in was the white background with the strange rock-like texture, the tan-colored menu bars at the side (left only at first), and at top, the graphic menu bar. Imagined like an index file, the concepts of this version of the Outpost were taken from a variety of inspirational sources -- I believe that Reel.com (at the time a big video online chain) was the source of inspiration for the colors and menu bars, while Shopping.com the foundation of my top tabs. The only trouble I had with those tabs was that they ultimately became too wide for the 640x480 users (who I simply will not cater to anymore!) so I had to go with a double-decker tab system eventually.

Soon to be gone was the SF content; this was the Outpost of today, the Doctor Who website of the day. The News Page grew by leaps and bounds. Star Trek and B5 content left the site, to be replaced by pages such as the Los Angeles Dr. Who Viewing Society, the expanded Reference Guide (complete with guides to the Virgin and BBC books) and the greatly expanded Reviews section. Also, my favorite page in all this era was the webspace for Gallifrey 2000; the background was a forest green, with images of trees fitting the tropical theme of that convention.

Concentric had proven to be an okay host, but traffic was booming, and soon they were unable to keep us. This is when I decided to move us to WestHost, the Utah-based provider that held us for the longest time... pretty much the entirety of the 3.0 era. WestHost was great, and I only left because their 'unlimited' bandwidth proved not to be so unlimited. During the 3.0 era, my bandwidth increased TEN FOLD; that's no exaggeration. In early 1999 I was getting about 200 hits a day; by start of 2001, it was almost 2,000 a day!

Each section in this era got its own color scheme. The color schemes today are largely the same as they were then, with a few exceptions. During the summer of 2000, I redesigned the front page with a second sidebar on the right; I call this Outpost 3.1. This enabled me not only to feature recent updates but also to do a bit of advertising for the convention (still, as always, the reason for the Outpost's existence), our clubs and so forth.

outpost 3.5
Early-to-Mid 2001

The last version before today's iteration. The colored TARDIS graphics down the left side were very popular; really, the main impetus of this was to (a) get rid of the tan bars that I'd gotten rather tired of over the past two years and (b) I'd gotten the idea in mind from an Andromeda website, SlipstreamWeb, to do colorized boxes around each section. (It was plenty difficult, since Netscape doesn't quite work right with it!)

This version of the site seems so real to me: the double-paned menu bars, the colorized Doctor Who logo at top right (given to me by my friend Robert Franks), and the amalgamation of the release calendar on the News Page sidebar. During this time, the site was hosted by Yahoo! Website, which seemed at the time to be my only hope for bandwidth issues. The Doctor Who News Page was now firmly a part of the Outpost, modified from its previous incarnations. Bandwidth continued to soar to its current rates of between 2,000 and 2,600 hits a day on the main page, and widely varying between 800 and 2,000 hits a day on the News Page depending on what was happening.

Outpost 3.5 also stands tall as the debut era of the Doctor Who Forum. Originally I hosted it locally using a software piece called Ikonboard, which I launched in early April 2001. But Ikonboard was buggy; it caused all sorts of dropped conversations and disappearing threads. The weekend I decided to shut it down was the most depressing time for me in the long history of the Outpost. Thankfully, after locating places like Coolboard (which shut down shortly thereafter), I was browsing one night and found the system my favored site SurvivorSucks.com used... EZBoard, our Forum's current home. The rest, as they say, is history.

I've wondered a few times whether or not I'd made the right choice to upgrade to 4.0. While I like the current iteration, I think 3.5 is probably my favorite, and will always be.

outpost 4.0
September 2001 to April 2002

Almost the Outpost of today... a dramatic change created in a fit of desperation to get my mind out of the tragedy of the September 11 terrorist attacks, if only to make the Outpost look a little more professional. (You might think the last version was, but to me it always looked amateurish.) It's too early to tell if the Outpost 4.0 version will create a new legacy, but I'm quite happy with it in the meantime.

The Outpost currently resides on two servers. It was necessary to split it up because of the amount of bandwidth consumed by the front page (index page) and the News Page. They, along with the Legacy page and the web space for the Doctor Who Alliance, reside at www.gallifreyone.com hosted by the American company A-Plus Hosting in Florida. The rest of the site, including the graphics for the Doctor Who Forum, are at www.gallifreyone.org hosted in Alberta, Canada by Tera-Byte. See, Yahoo! Website did an okay job at hosting us, but they didn't allow any CGI-scripting or any customization. With the move to the new sites, I was able to bring in some custom CGI work - including the News Headlines (which started in October 2001) and the new Guestbook hosted locally (started in early November). With any luck, A-Plus is soon to launch its own customizable Chat Room, too. And I've got a few ideas on how to make this new space work better for me!

Outpost 4.0 also introduced customized style sheets. Gone are the FONT tags and chaotic variable fonts; now everything looks standardized. I'm very happy with it; perhaps it's the best choice I made in this iteration. But it also caused me some headaches early on, as Macintoshes read the fonts a bit smaller in Netscape versions, so I had to jigger with the whole thing. Netscape itself caused me headaches of massive quantity; nested tables are an issue with version 4.7 and before, and so guess what the Outpost utilized... tons and tons of nested tables! (An even greater headache was caused when I naturally assumed I could have a site 800 pixels wide to be read just fine on an 800x600 monitor... forgetting that any page longer than one screen length caused a vertical scroll bar to appear on the right-hand side! I had to redo the math on all my pages virtually over one night!)

outpost 4.5
April 2002 to March 2003

Featuring a darker set of pigments for the front page and, for the first time, a uniform series of font selections throughout the site: the Tahoma font is now used exclusively as text. There are also recolorizations and other augmentations, notably the use of lower case in all menus and headline text. It wasn't that much of a change in terms of the elements themselves; they're all there from previous iterations. But the design work has indeed changed... things are more uniform. The lowercase titles are a clear indication of this changes in this iteration.

outpost 4.6
April 2003 to September 2003

The next phase of Outpost Gallifrey begins. Title banner graphics start to take the place of headers on each page (a work in progress) as things are more streamlined. The end of the dark phases of the Forum also comes in this iteration, as do the harsh colors, instead opting for softer pastels. And the front page becomes green for a while...

outpost 4.7
September 2003 to December 2003

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Doctor Who, I went with a "monochrome" approach, alternating graphics every several weeks. This seemed to be quite popular (generating its own buzz with a group tongue-in-cheekly calling itself the "Monochrome Alliance" on the Forum). Originally I'd planned to use the black and white only with the first two Doctors, but due to school I hadn't the time to update the color schemes all the time.

outpost 5.0
December 2003 to Present

And so, the "fifth generation" of Outpost Gallifrey has begun. The front-end (graphics) are based very much on the earlier draft; what's been hugely different is the back-end architecture, which is now completely generated using PHP script. The entire website has become largely database driven, with faster access to the Guides section (formerly known as "Reference"). The Doctor Who News Page is now split in two, with the coming of the new Doctor Who series, and the site is again split across two servers to handle the increased traffic. (The average daily accesses on the main site are 5,900 unique visitors per day as of December 1, 2003.) On to the future...

outpost images
selected graphics from six years of outpost history

Banner featured at the top of the News Page when Douglas Adams died.

An early design of the Doctor Who Alliance of North America banner.

Section header during the "black years" for the Babylon 5 news page.

The banner masthead for the 2.0 iteration, still seen on some pages as a link today.

The "black years" banner masthead, also used as a link bar.

A collection of iconic buttons from the various pages during the 1.0 incarnation; the Gallifrey 96 Photos button was one of my favorites.

Our brief Chat Server days in 1998... it was my goal to be a big chat center. Little did I know this would have probably gotten me shut down.

The legacy Convention Buttons. You can still see them on the old Visions page and in use (with changes) by the Sci-Fi Sea Cruise. This was my attempt to bring us all together. I believe it succeeded admirably.

The old LinkExchange banner... notice "LA Sci-Fi Connection" rather than Doctor Who? I mean, nobody was going to click a Doctor Who banner, were they?

The advertising bar for Gallifrey 1998....

...and the one for Gallifrey 1999.

Here's a switch: the button (like so many other buttons) for Gallifrey 1997.

I was pretty proud of this, especially since it was my first animated graphic!

I did my part in those early days!

I can't for the life of me remember what this was for (I've reduced it in size) or why I created it!

The 3.0 original banner.

Ah, my favorite page from the 3.0 years... the Gallifrey 11 website!

The original top-left corner icon for Outpost 1.0. So long ago...

Season One was a fan writing project that never got finished. It was the first and only time I hosted fan fiction. The editor disappeared on us, never to be seen again. Funny, I was supposed to write the final story in the series, and never got to it.

Gallifrey 2000's web page featured an online poll so we could use the questions in our game show that year.

The VERY short-run News Page logo before my good friend Mark Phippen decided to hand the 'officialness' of the Doctor Who News Page to me. This is still seen in the Links section of the Doctor Who Reference Guide edited by Dominique Boies.

Where the TARDIS was on the 2.0 and 3.0 versions, this was the graphic for the Star Trek news page. Cool, eh?

"The Trouble with John" by Kevin McNair... one of our Alternate Doctor Who novels when they were fashionable. That's John with Linda Rose, a singing partner, outside KCET studios in Los Angeles in 1994.

I created it, and damned if I ever used it or not!

The reddish-purple legacy graphic... probably the earliest graphic still to be seen in one or two places on the Web.

The button on Outpost 1.0 that took you to my personal home page. That's my head, sticking out of the sand at a Time Meddlers beach party from the late 1980's. God, I was younger then!

The original logo for Gallifrey 1998. My finest work, never seen again...

CompuServe's logo -- remembering, of course, that that's where I started!

Remember these? Planet-shaped buttons during 1.0. I loved these!

I was going all vertical-like during 2.0. The only survivor today is the vertical "Ambrosia" logo on that page. This would have been fairly omnipresent throughout the site.

The Friends of Doctor Who store logo.

My Outpost Bookstore original logo.

Back when it was more flashy to do cheap graphics on the fly, this was one of the headers during the early 3.0 years on the main page.

Ah, the man, the myth, the legend of Keith Topping... actually a headshot used as a button on the first incarnation of the Interviews page (3.5)

The button I created using James Sellwood's Doctor Who News Page logo when I got permission to use it.

An original Outpost 2.0 banner bar.

Thanks for your interest in the history of Outpost Gallifrey. Now go home. It's over!

The following are part of Outpost Gallifrey's "College of Cardinals" for their donations to the website in 2003:

Kathryn Sullivan
Karl Jawert
Earle Foster
Drew Vogel
Stephen Dunn
Matt Fitton
K C Brown
G Lindsay
Michael Blumenthal
Jearl D Walker Jr
Mike Amaral
Matthew K Krankka
Jacqueline Kamlot
Robert Johns
Jeff Eldridge
Steve Tribe
Graham/Gillie
Eric Cheezum
Bruce Cameron-Stuart
Mathew Child
Mike Maddox
MA Wassell
Nick Abadzis
Stephen James Walker
Benjamin D. Stephens
Andrew Norcross
A.R. Fitch
Christian Cheung
Judith Zarin
Arfie Mansfield
Paul F. Engelberg
D G Shorley
Wayne Broughton
Joseph O'Brien
Jason Bartholomew
Joeydangers (G.M.)
Ben Neale
Dan Harris
Tom Wilk
Greg McElhatton
Jonathan Murphy
Stephen Sherry
Stephen William Theaker
Jamie Lee
Roysillon
Andrew Whitmore
Tom Rodebaugh
Simon Bucher-Jones
Jason Marsden
Arnold T. Blumberg
Kevin Lim
Angela I Kiernan
Shawn Channell
Steve Manfred
Philip J Murray
Mick J Hogben
Felicity Kusinitz
Chris ("chrismif")
Timothy Plummer
Jeffery Bartz
Jeffrey J Cioletti
Richard Martin
Five anonymous users

And thank you to everyone who offered their kind words and comments!

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