G-ville Timeline

Oct. 10, 2001 -  Quicktopic Message Board

The idea for an online message board came about shortly after Todd and Amanda’s wedding in late 2001. It seemed like a great way for our geographically dispersed family to stay in touch without exerting too much effort or expense.

Nick is the one who gave Gilliomville its name via AOL Instant Messenger when I was setting up the original message board and couldn’t think of anything to call it. He suggested, “Why not Gilliomville”?  Sounded good to me, and the name stuck.

The message board was much more of a hit than anybody expected. Soon Gillioms and Franks were posting to it pretty regularly from Indiana, Texas, Arizona, California, and Alaska.

Before long, there was talk of establishing a normal website where we could post photographs and be able to reach the message board with a simple mouse click.

In early 2002, I started archiving the message board posts in case we ever lost the Quicktopic site. I still have most of the archives, though two pages (part of December, 2001 and part of February 2002, I think) were corrupted and the information is no longer viewable. I tried to revisit these pages through the Quicktopic site, but they only save a limited number of posts (going back to 2004 as of last month). It’s possible the lost posts could be accessed by a paid membership, but I’m not willing to pay the $49 membership fee to find out.

Dec. 17, 2001 - Original Gilliomville Website

The first Gilliomville page was set up on a free Tripod account. It had the Gilliomville logo, a link to the message board, a list of Gilliom/Frank birthdays (compiled by Nancy Frank) and a Link of the Week. The first link of the week was a Fraser Fir Christmas Tree website in response to an ongoing message board discussion at the time. The idea of, “safety needles” really captured my imagination. I think the first full photo gallery was Todd and Amanda’s wedding gallery.

Gilliomville started growing from there, though we were limited by the Tripod account’s skimpy amount of free server space. We basically had a FAQ page and, eventually, a few photo galleries.

April, 2002 – Gilliomville.com

Gilliomville proper went into effect when we purchased the Gilliomville.com domain and some server space which was paid for by Uncle Jon and reimbursed by contributions from the Gillioms and Franks.

Gilliomville.com grew pretty big for its britches as we added all kinds of bells and whistles – extensive photo galleries, survey pages, and I don’t remember what all. It became a pretty high maintenance endeavor, but I had some time on my hands in those days. It actually kept me out of trouble by giving me something productive to occupy my time through some pretty sketchy times.

By this time, I was living in Los Angeles and had a stable address for the first time since late 1999. I left a lot of personal items in Uncle Jon’s garage when I left Alaska for Las Vegas at the end of 1999 and now these items started trickling back to me. I also acquired a scanner, so family photographs began to appear in the extensive Gilliomville galleries.

                                                                                 

December, 2006 - Messageboard “Upgrade”

By 2006, Gilliomville was running on server space provided at a substantial discount by an acquaintance from The Real World…Blogger Style! who also provided quite a bit of additional software options. In an attempt to make the message board more up-to-date and versatile, I installed a more powerful message board program which ran on our own server. The new message board included individual avatars, the ability to hotlink images inside posts, and all kinds of extra features.

The new message board met with quite a bit of resistance from the Gilliomville community. People didn’t like the logon process and some would-be participants experienced difficulty accessing the new board. I ran a poll asking what people thought of the new message board and only received one response, from cousin Nick Frank, stating, “It sucks.” So, by popular demand, I brought back the original Quicktopic message board. For a time, both boards were accessible from the main Gilliomville page, but Quicktopic was the clear favorite.

May, 2007 - Gilliomville.org

Due to a dispute with the irreputable Domain Registry of America, I allowed Gilliomville.com to expire in 2007. I purchased the Gilliomville.org domain for less than half what I was paying for Gilliomville.com (which wasn’t much, but it was the principle that companies shouldn’t price gouge domain names).

Also, at this time, the acquaintance who was providing our generous amount of discounted server space went into a different business altogether, so I purchase commercial server space. To keep costs down (and since I no longer had a lot of extra time on my hands), Gilliomville.org became a much leaner, low-maintenance website. I dropped the bulky photo galleries and most of the fluff, keeping Gilliomville confined to one page with links to the original Quicktopic Messageboard and to a Flickr account where a selection of Gilliomville photographs were stored.

[From "I Left My Heart in Gilliomville," 2008]