Tom Simpson On Fandom And The Birth Of Tom's Xena Page
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Tom Simpson On Fandom And The Birth Of Tom's Xena Page |
| Interviewer: | Diane Silver |
| Interviewee: | Tom Simpson |
| Date(s): | conducted in the spring of 1997, posted October 1997 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | Xena: Warrior Princess |
| External Links: | Tom Simpson on Fandom and the Birth of Tom's Xena Page, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Tom Simpson On Fandom And The Birth Of Tom's Xena Page is a 1997 Xena: Warrior Princess fan interview at Whoosh!.
The focus was Tom's Xena Fan Fiction Archive.
Series
For others in this series, see Whoosh! Interview Series.
Some Excerpts
When did you get involved with online Xena fandom?
The last two weeks of May, 1996. May 31, 1996, the first Tom's Xena Page went online. You know you're a die-hard nutball if you can remember the original yellow rocks background that I had for the first month.
What did you do first in online Xenadom and how did your online activities change over time?
First d*mn thing I did was to go nuts and start digitizing and publishing pictures and sounds for everyone. I had just bought a new toy, a Snappy, and needed something to use it on. I had done some work on an X-Files page, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to all the other X-Files sites out there. When I started my Xena page, however, there were really only two large Xena sites, Logomancy and Bumzer's. I knew that I could make a great web page, and Xena would let my efforts be appreciated by others.
So, when I first started I was just concerned with my web site, and trying to make some good content for it. After a few weeks I started to visit the NetForum, and had my first contact with other Xena fans. I found out about the WBS chat area, and started to visit there, to chat with other Xenites directly. From there I learned of the mailing lists, subscribed to Chakram and Xenaverse, and the rest is history.
What was it like during the early days online? How has it changed?
When I first made Tom's Xena Page, I was fanatic about getting other Xena sites to link to it. I had a small page, just 20 images I had scanned from "Callisto" and a few sounds. I had a counter running, but not too many people were visiting. So I judged success by how many people linked to my site (as pitiful a site as it was.)
One of the nicest things was all the help that people offered me in trying to make my site more legible. I had these cool yellow rocks as a background, but text was nearly illegible on top of it. I went through as many size permutations as I could, but finally I admitted defeat and decided to make my own background, the now familiar green of Tom's Xena Page.
Back in the early days most of the web sites were just small pages that had the same images copied from MCA's web page presented in a different format. There were only a few sites that had any substantial amount of files, and these pages were fairly generalized, i.e. each page was trying to offer up a little bit of everything to all comers.
As time went on, some of the sites just kept growing into mega-sites. At this point, new websites that came along became specialized, offering a different content. Things like fan fiction only pages, or Xena vs. Barbie come to mind. With the large sites to provide most of the sounds and images, new websites now can try to offer alternative content, with polls, games, or more creative things.