Happy Domain Name Day! Exactly two years ago today, RinkWorks moved to its current domain name, http://www.rinkworks.com/. Pop quiz: at what URL did RinkWorks reside prior to that? (Answer further down.)

Here's a hint: it was hosted on my university's mainframe, permitted by a very gracious system administrator. RinkWorks' first appearance in Yahoo's Pick of the Week (Book-A-Minute SF/F) happened in the last couple weeks the site was hosted there. The hit count jump shocked me so much, I kept emailing him to make sure their network wasn't being bogged down by the non-academic traffic. But no.

However, as a (wise) security precaution, CGI programs and scripts were not allowed in student web sites; the web server was configured so it wouldn't run them. So pre-rinkworks.com RinkWorks did not and could not consist of any CGI processes. There was no search engine on At-A-Glance Film Reviews, and things like Crazy Tales, Fantasy Name Generator, the Message Forum, RinkChat and all the various games would not have been possible. Once I did move to a professional web space provider that could give me CGI access, I made quick use of it, putting up The Dialectizer not long after, which would ultimately become RinkWorks most frequented feature.

You can look at the RinkWorks Timeline for more historical reminiscing.

And the answer to the pop quiz question? http://pubpages.unh.edu/~ss1/rink/. The hierarchy of features was different, too, because, for example, At-A-Glance Film Reviews resided at http://pubpages.unh.edu/~ss1/movies/, rather than http://pubpages.unh.edu/~ss1/rink/movies/.