Boinng has been spinning headlong into the millenium, and out the other side, since 1st April 1999. It is designed and produced by Tim Cook and members of the Boinng Collective.

BIRTH

Way back in 1993 (ish) Jayne Elsey and the future webmaster Tim were discussing the relative merits of reality, as young persons in a small town (Petersfield) are sometimes wont to do, when the concept of an alien planet arose. It was decided that this planet had significant advantages over reality, and that it would be a nice place to live. Jayne suggested a name for this planet, being "Boingg" (in fact "Boingg three and a third", being the third satellite moon of "Boingg"). The motion was passed.

Nobody ever said we could spell. Or even miss-spell consistently. Look, we're creative types, okay? What's a couple of n's and g's between friends?

Boinng (the website) has been running lopsided since some time later on the 1st April 1999, when it started life as a single blue page with the word mentalist proudly emblazoned across it in very large red type. As an artistic statement, this worked very well, and the site was a great success with the single person who saw it. Spurned on by this initial triumph, "Mentalist" soon sported more advanced features, such as a picture and an email address.

But such rapid growth into the commercial internet sector demanded a properly researched brand image, and regrettably the "Mentalist" catchline was dropped for the more explanatory and accessible "Planet Boinng" motif (the 'Planet' part was later dropped, after it was blown up by aliens).

LIES

In retrospect, Boinng is a universally accepted work of dedicated genius, and has been the inspiration for much of what we now know of as "the internet". Its hard to believe that only a few short months ago the "net" was still in seen only in monochrome, and relied on armies of expensively trained physicists to move the words from each page to the individual modems of its dozen billionaire subscribers. Now, all that has changed, and the "boinng-web" supplies words, pictures and even tunes to hundreds of people, some of them quite poor.

Boinng's immense success in making the "wwww" popular and enjoyable is reflected in the underhand tricks employed by the traditional dinosaurs of the medium to supress it. To date, Yahoo! refuses to list the site in its directory, for fear of the commercial catastrophe that would surely befall its bloated organisation.

MIDDLE AGED SPREAD

At its height, The lucrative Boinng franchise attracted over six visits nearly every day, sometimes, and was famously labelled the 17th most visited site in Petersfield, Hampshire. As the sharper industry observers will know, Petersfield is a Silicon Valley style boom town in southern England that is fast becoming a hotbed for some of the most exciting new website development this side of Buriton. By 2024, it is predicted that over a quarter of Petersfield will have access to the electric internet, even in their own huts.

DEATH

They said it couldn't happen, but unfortunately Tim got terminally bored with Boinng in October of 2000 and decided to blow the site up. In what was, quite possibly, the first ever controlled explosion of a website, the site was gradually destroyed by unknown alien invaders until what was left was little more than a smouldering shell. The gods themselves cried out in anguish. Was Boinng truly gone? Well, yes, it was.

RESURRECTION

But then it sort of came back. On New Years Day, 2001, with Auld Langs Syne still ringing in the ears of the webmaster, and lest old aquaintance be forgot, Boinng was rescued from the vaults. The site, digitally remastered and fully restored, was returned from the cold embrace of internet death to reclaim it's world heavyweight title.

THE TRIALS

Boinng's return from internet Valhalla was not to be easy however. Something new was needed. Something better. The existing version of the site, number five, was worn and frayed at the edges; worse still its design & coding- once the very peak of perfectness- had become outdated and difficult to manage. More user interaction was needed; but this was just static HTML with an Ezboard forum tacked on. Work began on the ill-fated version six; later to be known as the Boinng with the shortest lifespan ever.

V6 had a big idea behind it; use the Diary-X journals system to give members of Boinng's collective their own pages on the site, which they could update at their own pace. It was a nice idea, and on 4th February 2001 an unfinished but operational diary-x powered Boinng went online. Then things started to go wrong.

Firstly, the design was pants. I mean it really stank. Too blue, too wimpy and pastelly, too dull. Secondly the unfinished bits never were finished. Due to total motivational failure on Tim's behalf, version six never even got close to completion; it was just too naff to live. Then came the really brutal twist; one weekend at the end of February- barely twenty days since the launch of Six- the whole site was deleted by the host, Lineone, because of an overused Webcam. However, by this point, an embryonic version Seven was already on the way..

SEVEN OF BOINNG

The seventh iteration of Boinng- the one you are looking at now, kind of- began life as an experiment in CSS to funk up the pastelly, poor version six. When Lineone turned axe-murderer, the experiment became Boinng's only chance for survival, and the rough sketch was swiftly drafted in to link up the collective diaries and the forum. A launch date was set for the new, complete site- April 1st 2001, the second birthday of the original Boinng. Things carried on in the background, shifting all the old stuff into the new layout. Then came the final twist. Slap bang in the middle of March, just a fortnight or so before the all important deadline, Gizmo- loyal vanguard of the collective that he is- pointed Tim in the direction of something called PHP-Nuke. Here was a ready made system that did everything Boinng had aspired to with the diary-x integration, and about a million things more. Even the now advert-riddled Ezboard forum could be dispensed with. In a matter of minutes, everything got shelved and version seven got nuked. It was launched on time, two weeks later on April 1st 2001.

END OF AN ERA

Then on April 28, 2002 Tim announced the unthinkable; he was to retire as webmaster of Boinng! Less to say this rocked the very foundations that Boinng was built on. Building specialists had to be called in to assess and rectify the damage caused. However, instead of the site being blown up, again, Tim announced that Gizmo would take over the reins as Lord Protector of Boinng.

BACK UP A SECOND...

The Gizmo era, when Boinng co-existed with its cousins over at theFluffles.com empire, proved that as a universal force Boinng could continue no matter where or what it was. In yet another bloodless coup a few months later however, on 16th August 2002, Tim reared up from his bath chair and claimed back the site in a unpredictable geriatric frenzy. Aliens were blamed, in accordance with tradition, and Boinng.com was restored.

THE POSTNUKE YEARS

From late 2001 until mid 2006, Boinng - or Planet Boinng as it became again, after returning to its roots - was based on the Postnuke content management system, a "fork" of PHP Nuke. During this time, the code was tweaked and customised endlessly and gradually became a bespoke system, complete with its own modules for user journals and instant messaging (the popular "Buddy" module, which was released and is still in use on some other PHP Nuke, Postnuke, and Xoops based sites). The price paid for all this customisation was a drift away from some of the most up to date technology, eventually resulting in a serious snag in May 2006, when the site's security was compromised. It was a dark period in the Planet's already long history, with more than five years of data tied up in a complex, outdated database that was no longer safe on the internet. Tim had no choice but to pull the plug.

PLUG IN BABY

The Planet doesn't give up easily. Over the space of two weeks in the middle of 2006, every post, article, blog, and merest scrap of user information was painstakingly extracted from the old Postnuke site, and transplanted into an all new, Drupal-based framework. With no easy, automated solution, much of the new database had to be pieced together by hand, and carefully tweaked to fit within the Drupal system - and fit it did. The new site - let's call it version 8 for the hell of it - launched intact on 4th June 2006, complete with every scrap of content going right back to the very first articles from that long forgotten homepage in 1999.

Nobody ever said websites were easy, did they?