| The History |
The happyrobot world internet franchise began in Brooklyn, NY, sometime in 1997, although documentation from the early days is hard to come by. The first versions of happyrobot were retarded looking messes featuring badly written goobly-gock and lame ass attempts at humor. People flocked to happyrobot, and then quickly flocked away at the same speed or faster as they had just flocked.
In January 1999, the website finally came of age with the purchase of the happyrobot.net domain. Somehow, the idea of making happyrobot some kind of collective happened, and people all over the world starting contributing content and fun stuff - and the robot grew.
Which somehow brings us to this point, years later. We are still going strong and feeling fine.
The following are glimpses into our past - site changes, announcements, fun stuff.
Enjoy.
|
|
 
| Version 13 |
Version 13 was launched in September 2004 - it was the first time that the menu/homepage for happyrobot had been a color other than black.
I had become tired of the black background - I think it reminded me of too many gaming sites or something. Maybe it was becoming a bit too geeky, but not in the geeky way I wanted.
It was a big change.
There were also significant changes to the way I built pages for this site. It was the first robot project where I began to adopt more CSS and layers for the layout.
|
|
| Version 10-12 |
|
Number 10, in my opinion, started a whole new phase of the robot - probably one of the most prolific periods of the site's history. This, of course, is due to our incredible writers and staff who spent tons of time contributing awesome stuff.
Version 12 was the last version of the black menu.
|
|
| Version 10 |
This was the announcement for Version 10, which I completed after being laid off (bastards!) and right after Mac's OSX came out (even though i run Win2000).
Version 10 was frameless (at least the main menu) which was a big change, although the general look was about the same (just cooler). This is easily my favorite announcement/parody I have ever done.
|
|
| April Fools 2001 |
|
This was a painfully bright and ugly re-do of the main menu for April Fools. Many people complained.
|
|
| Version 9 |
The announcement for Version 9 was my fun AOL rip-off.
Version 9 abandoned the multiple pages section on the menu for one big, long menu - it went from clean to busy real fast. But version 9 was the first version of the current theme of the site.
|
|
| November 2000 |
I don't know which version this was - maybe 8? 7?
Crap. I should be keeping better records.
This version was up for most of 2000, and incorporated a main menu page with different sub-menus. This featured some of our first writers, mainly Kristen, and also early versions of database applications for the movie and book review pages.
It was a fairly clean design for the robot.
|
|
| Novemeber 1999 |
|
The fall of 1999 the site had some minor changes. This is a crappy screenshot I got from web.archive.org (not their fault it's crappy), but you can kind of make out the beginnings of the 'red star' system (those images didn't load).
|
|
| Summer 1999 |
|
I suppose 1999 was the first hint of the general happyrobot theme. This screenshot is from September. This was a fine looking page, but the navigation on the left is kinda clunky.
|
|
| Summer 1998 |
|
I included this just becuase it was my first expriement with javascript rollovers. Kinda funny.
|
|
| Version 1.something 1998? |
This just makes me cringe looking at it. Currently, this is the earliest version of the website that would one day become the thing you are looking at now (this is spring 1998 as far as i can tell). Ouch. This really hurts to look at.
None the less, it's my past and I should become comfortable with it's suckiness. Of note, some of you may recognize the background image - it's a picture of this kid in a vampire outfit that I stole from a photo lab that I worked at right after college. It was shot on 110 film and the focus and exposure were nutty, so I of course had to make myself a copy.
|
|
|
