The Credits

The Beginning

The first person to take a whack at this information superhighway malarkey was a mathematician called Cormac Long in 1998. Standing tall, mainly due to his hairstyle, he brought forth the first site. He created the history page, a page on the committee a list of hikes (using the same general layout that's used today) and a pictures page. Unfortunately, while maths endows one with a talent for logic and problem solving, it doesn't help one out with what can only have been chronic colour-blindness. For background on that first site Cormac chose the most sickly looking custard yellow my eyes have ever had the misfortune to behold. It was bad.

Cormac was aided (some might say abetted) by the worlds oldest first-year rep, Harry Bach, a Masters student from Wales. Harry did some writeups on the club's activities for a project. Luckily he could distinguish between colour, there was no yellow on his pages. There was a blue clouds background, loads of clipart and some fancy text effects instead. It was, um, pretty.

And that was where things lay at the end of the 98/99 season.

The Expansion

In 1998 Dave Clifford (stats) became the club P.R.O. and instantly started work on the page. He created new event lists and committee pages, started up a mailing list by just getting people to write down their emails on the bus, and set up several new picture pages. By far his greatest achievement though was the creation of the comment page. Originally meant to be just a guestbook, this thing soon saw up to 30 messages a week and became the major focus of the site.

Also at this time, Dave asked the foreign students if they'd write up an introduction for the site. Two, Emiliano Muñoz and Jirí Horík responded. Emiliano did the Spanish one, and Jiri stunned us all with a really professional page with pictures of Coomsaharn and Snowdon in Wales on his. He even did an English translation, which is the main English About Us page on the site.

At the end of the season, people started organising their own hikes. This was where I came in (I'm Bryan Feeney by the way). I threw up a small piece of CGI in Perl to let people arrange these things online. Twas a shortlived success, but it gave me ideas. Still no progress on that yellow though.

Growing Pains

For the 2000 season, we decided to have a Law student as P.R.O., Conor O' Mahony. Conor continued on much as Dave did, but the running of the site became a lot more consistent and regular, and we built up a fair body of material (like the alps writeup).

Unfortunately, only one month into the job, Conor ended up dealing with the ugly end of the net as the comment page got it's first very own troll. Presumably lashing out at the world for a raging and embarrassing rash (seems he misunderstood people when they talked about "animal husbandry") he started harassing the then captain by all means possible. Eventually the comment page got shut down.

Cormac and myself started working pretty quickly tracing this guy, and we (well, mainly Cormac) soon traced him back to a specific computer within a company, which started an internal investigation once notified. I'd created an anti-troll version of the comment page a week after it shut down, but we decided not to let on in the hope that he'd give us enough rope to hang him with. I continued on making updates to my new message board and on October 3rd we re-opened the site with a brand new comment page. By November our friend had been found.

The Re-launch

I ended up on the 2001 committee (treasurer) with a nasty surplus to explain to the PE office (nice one Mike!). At this stage the comment page had gone through a good few versions and was proving to be stable. I guess miracles really do happen. Anyway, having bleated about what I could do to the club website for months on end I was told to get cracking. It took a while, but things slowed down at work (2001 was not a year to be a web-designer) and I eventually made a start. The new site was launched on August 21st in a great big multi-coloured frenzy. Multi-coloured that it, except for a certain ghastly shade of yellow which was obliterated for (with any luck) all eternity.