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.
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]
