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History of VampireFreaks.com |
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The term "vampirefreaks" actually dates back to my years in high school in brooklyn. When I was about 15, I was just getting into the industrial scene, and I would draw random drawings and graffiti in my notebooks during class, just something to do when I was bored. One of the prevalent things I would write would be "Vampire Freaks", which I thought would be a cool name for a band or something, as I was also really interested in vampire stories at the time. And around the same time I also would draw a version of the VF logo, but with jagged teeth in it. So when I decided to make my own website, luckily "vampirefreaks.com" was not taken so I decided to use the name.
1999: Vampirefreaks.com started in the end of 1999, as my own personal homepage. I was 20 years old at the time and a student at the University of Rochester, studying computer science. While I studied C++ and Java programming in school, I taught myself html, javascript and flash to make my own website. The original version of the website consisted of a simple animated flash intro, and links to pictures of me and my friends, a messageboard, and a few industrial music reviews.
2000: when I really made the first version of the website, slowly adding more content. The site slowly grew a following, with its own community of regulars on the messageboard, and I began accepting submissions for people to be featured in the picture sections of the site. At the time, the pics section consisted of a few specially chosen people, all chosen for their freakish style and attractive looks. I manually went through all the email submissions and chose the few I liked best and posted them on the site, eventually becoming an elite gallery of beautiful freaks. Also the music reviews section slowly grew. I finished college and started working as a software engineer, doing c++ programming.
2001: I added a few interactive flash animations, which were fairly simple, but entertaining. And also added some interviews with industrial bands. We also did the first VF party in Toronto, which was a great time. At this time, the vampirefreaks site had been slowly getting more and more traffic, it had already been established as one of the most visited goth/industrial sites (at a time when there really weren't too many), and was at a point where it was costing over $200 a month in webhosting fees, yet was not making any money. It was great to see the site getting a good amount of traffic, but I simply could not afford to keep losing money on web hosting. So in an effort to offset these webhosting fees, I decided to try making an online clothing store where I would sell freaky clothing to the people who visited the vampirefreaks site. I wasn't sure what to call the online store, but I did have a few domain names that I had in mind, so I took a poll on the vampirefreaks egroup and the majority of the members voted for calling it ********. Ofcourse later I would realize having the word "********" in a domain name would cause me a few problems, and had to make an alternate address for it at Synth-tec.com. I was getting tired of leading a corporate life, sitting in a cubicle for 8 hours a day. I really loved programming, but just couldn't stand being stuck in a cubicle all day, working on something that didn't interest me. I learned how to program in ASP in order to do the ecommerce for the online store. After a few months of programming the new site in ASP, the online store was open for business, starting out with just a few items for sale, from companies such as lip-service and serious clothing. The store only got about 1 order a day at first, but has slowly grown ever since. shortly after starting the online store, I was fired from my job. I had grown sick of the corporate world, and I was fired mainly due to losing interest in the job and just not caring anymore about it. I really just liked working on vampirefreaks and ********, so when I found out i was fired, I took this as my chance to just try working on the websites full time. The online store was at a point where it wasn't making too much money, and vampirefreaks was now costing even more for webhosting, but vampirefreaks now served as an advertising tool to draw customers to the online store. I wound up having to go into some credit card debt to cover my living expenses, but atleast I was happy to be out of my job which I had started hating. I got a few dj gigs in the meantime, and started up my own clubnight in rochester, called "Synthetic Circuitry". The clubnight didn't really do too well, but considering it was on wednesday nights in Rochester, a small city in upstate new york, it did pretty decent, getting about 40-50 people. At this time I also started posting up some dj sets.
2002: Vampirefreaks had another flash intro. ******** was now doing well enough to cover my living expenses, and I really had no desire to stay in Rochester any longer, so I moved back to my hometown of Brooklyn, NY, moving into the house of my old friend Herman (DJ Audiophile). I started getting back into the nyc clubscene, and met my wonderful wife, veronika. Special thanks to her sister, natalia for introducing us. Together with Audiophile, we started up the new york city industrial clubnight called "cybertron". The first 2 Cybertron parties, we had big snowstorms, and mostly only our personal friends came out to support. Also, we did the successful Nightmare After Xmas party in toronto, too bad the promoter ******** us over.
2003: Over time, the Cybertron night slowly grew, it attracted more and more people, including a group of regulars and we wound up all knowing eachother. Cybertron was cross-promoted with the vampirefreaks website, so it was a way to promote the website locally in the nyc area, and Vampirefreaks also attracted people to the clubnight. I rewrote ******** in PHP, because I decided ASP is a piece of crap programming language that kept having memory leaks. I really liked coding in PHP because it was similar to C++, which is what I had studied in college. Also, made a new intro for the site. VampireFreaks continued to get more and more traffic, but I was getting bored of updating it all in html and really just wanted to do something that would be more interactive and automated. And now that I had learned some php, I started working on a dynamic php version of the site.
2004: My son, Joshua was born. A month after his birth, the new version of Vampirefreaks was complete, I called it "Vampirefreaks 2.0". I completely revamped the vampirefreaks website, and made it a new interactive profile website, programmed in php. The new format allowed anybody to join and post their pictures, compared to the previous system where I had to review everyone's picture submissions and only choose a select few. Other new features included a rating system, where users could rate eachother, and see who has made it to the top. Also, made an interactive messaging system for communicating with the other members. The site traffic quickly skyrocketted after this, and a few months later was already getting more traffic than any other gothic/industrial website in the world. But with this increased traffic, also came a ton of web hosting problems. After a while, one server could no longer handle the site, the site would get extremely slow, and it was very difficult to find ways to optimize the code to enhance the site speed, and find ways to add new servers. So I enlisted the help of an expert system administrator, known as hubert, who has been a tremendous help in dealing with the problems associated with running such a popular site. Despite the scalability problems, I continued to enhance the new site, adding new features such as journals, new ways to browse the various users, and user icons to the comments. New industrial music reviews and interviews were also added. Also, I had managed to figure out how to make vampirefreaks pay for its own web hosting costs, by putting ads on the website and offering a few extra features to "premium members", which included an advanced search for finding users in your area, and more picture space.
2005: New features included the ability to create member communities known as "cults", a system for posting and rating music reviews, a new messageboard integrated with the profiles, events listings from around the world, signatures, picture comments, vf messenger and much more. 2005 had a whole lot of server problems, the continued site growth is always a constant battle with trying to keep the site from slowing down. While the site is doing well, the server and hosting costs are now pretty outrageous. But really, I can't complain. From this point on, it's always a new adventure trying to figure out how to keep the site from slowing down. They simply don't make books on "How to run a website that gets 3 million hits a day without it killing your web servers". So really this is the tricky part.
2005 also marked the first "Freaquency" parties, which are the bigger parties we throw in nyc. Also, now there's a nyc vf crew. People who have been dedicated to helping out with all the vf nyc events. Special thanks to Morbius, Casper, 7, Master_Sephiroth, Spiderfairy, jamie_lynn, and ofcourse Audiophile continues to dj as well as do sound engineering.
Vampirefreaks.com now gets over 3 million page views a day, 150,000 unique visitors a day, has over 400,000 active member profiles (profiles that are inactive for 6 months are deleted), and reaches over 5,000 members logged into the site at once during peak times. As for the future of Vampirefreaks.com, as usual there are a lot of new features planned. Keep on the lookout for the new enhancements to make the site even bigger and better.
 ootz · Tue Jul 11, 2006 @ 08:38am · 0 Comments |
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