A Fresh Start
Hey everyone,
You are either saying “Man, JediNet has been down for the past week! I wonder what’s up?” or “Man, I guess JediNet finally gave up the fight. That site had been dead man, dead.”
Well, first off, I’ll be the first to admit that posting Star Wars news hasn’t been my top priority in this post-Revenge of the Sith world. Not that I disliked the film, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit — more than I expected to. However, I personally don’t have a lot of interest in the whole EU scene and JediNet’s staff had dwindled over the years. It turned into Shada posting collecting news and my hopping on every once in a while to post major news.
Well, technical matters intervened and lit a fire under me. Last week when I was uploading pictures from a friend’s wedding to a personal site I had hosted on the JN server, I noticed that there were some issues. My FTP transfer kept cutting off, and when I logged onto the server remotely I couldn’t stay connected. A phone call to tech support was placed. I was told that my hard drive was toast as well as the motherboard.
I had been hosting JN on a Windows 2003 server because the site was running on a custom ASP program. This cost about a hundred dollars a month, and that made it necessary to fill the site with ugly, annoying banner and interstitial ads — when I took over JN in 2004 it was paying for itself every month, I’ll be the first to admit that the revenue from the months surrounding Episode III’s release helped to pay for my new computer (a PowerMac G5, which seems so outdated now a year and a half later)… but as of late, well, not a lot of Star Wars news being posted, less people visiting and I was paying out of pocket monthly even with all the banners. Had I not been hosting some other sites on the server I may very well have pulled the plug a few months ago.
The server crash seemed like a perfect opportunity to do just that. However, after a day of work and a lot of reading of The Unofficial Apple Weblog and Engadget, I said to myself “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you had a community-driven site where folks could write about Star Wars.”
JediNet, as an established domain, seems like a good stepping stone for just that. So here’s the deal. I’m inviting you, the person reading this, to set up an account here and post. It could be a review of the latest Star Wars book or comic, it could be news that just broke and you’d like to share with fans, it cold be something about an interview with someone you’ve done for your web site. I’m going to leave this open and unmoderated to start — consider it an experiment. If folks start abusing the posting, I’ll be forced to add moderation… and of course we’ll be working on bringing back some of the old JediNet content to you in the coming weeks. If anyone would like to lend a hand, set up a user account and drop a comment in here. In the meantime, enjoy and happy posting.
