Old RockyMusic.org
I'm not quite sure how it happened, but at some point around 1995 I started seriously
collecting Rocky Horror related CDs.
All of them... no matter how bad the studio cast was, how obscure the link to Rocky Horror
was, or how expensive the import CD was. I scoured local music stores, went to record
conventions, traveled to other cities to browse their used CD stores, and searched through
the online catalog for CD
Connection before they had a web site (you actually had to
telnet to a dedicated
server with a command line search interface). I had consciously decided to concentrate on
collecting CDs (as opposed to vinyl)
both because I thought it might actually be possible to find essentially all of them and
because they were so much cheaper to obtain. Even then, certain
Rocky Horror Show cast
album LPs would sell for a couple hundred dollars between collectors... and this was before
eBay became popular.
RockyMusic.org itself had its origins in the first cast web site for
Austin Rocky Horror. Another cast
member ("Grackle", now an
APD officer) decided to put
up a basic cast web site in early 1996. He gave me a login to modify the site, so I started
adding other Rocky Horror related content... such as a section on Rocky related CDs. This
grew and grew until I eventually decided to split it off into its own site. Thus the
"Rocky Horror Related CDs" web site was born, in early 1997. It continued growing rapidly,
and in December 1997 was renamed "The Musical World of Rocky Horror" (after
Little Nell's single) due to
the fact that I was now including vinyl albums as well as CDs. The site was hosted by
whatever ISP I had at the time (Internet Direct, Eden, KDI) until finally in November 1998
I was able to move it to its very own domain name: RockyMusic.org.
I stayed very active updating the web site (which had become incredibly popular) until
around May 1999, when I essentially stopped updating it at all. This was due to a number of
reasons. First, I got a "real job" as a programmer. Most of the early work I'd done had
been while I had crappy jobs doing telephone customer service or similar, which meant that I
had little money but lots of free time. At my first programming job it was important
for me to prove myself, and I ended up working many 60+ hour weeks. After that much time
programming, I had little motivation to work on web sites once I got home. Second, I knew
very little about web technologies while writing the site (and didn't have CGI access in any
case) so therefore everything was done manually. As the site grew, there were more and
more places where I would have to update the same thing when it changed. This wasn't a big
deal when I had loads of free time, but became a bigger and bigger problem. Third, after I'd
gone such a long time without updating the site there was a significant amount of inertia
working against it happening.
I eventually realized that the only way it ever would happen would be if I completely
reworked the entire site from the ground up. Which is exactly what I did, starting around
August 2006. The site was re-launched on December 31st, 2006 after I decided it was "good enough"
to replace what was at the old site. It's likely that I'll never again be as active as I once was at updating RockyMusic.org,
due to any number of reasons including increased job and family responsibilities as well as other hobbies.
But the fact that this new incarnation is so much more easily
maintainable does mean that I can now make changes gradually over time without much difficulty. And
I can always reorganize the way it's presented later on, as sections grow larger and larger. Take
a look at the recent additions page to
see what I've been up to lately. But please don't take it personally if the answer is that it's been a few
months since I've done anything...:-)