EDITORIAL

Frontier Pop History and Mission Statement

By Editor and Publisher C. A. Passinault

Editorial for Frontier Pop Issue 1

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Welcome to the premier issue of Frontier Pop!
It’s been a long road to where we are today. The story is as long as the time I have been on the Internet, and I’ve been on the Internet every day for the past 12 years.
Allow me to explain.
This is not the first attempt at doing a “magazine” web site. In fact, it’s the third, and the final, attempt in 12 years, and this attempt will succeed because we have 12 years of successful web design and publications in our favor.
The first attempt came in the summer of 1998, a time when I had spent less than a year on the Internet, but each day since the Christmas day, 1997, I had spent online. In those days before my first year was up on the Internet, I started to learn web design. It changed my life.
I didn’t have any web design programs to work with, and barely had a copy of Photoshop 5 for my use. I went to Best Buy in Brandon, bought “How to make a web site in a weekend” from their used book section, and taught myself HTML. I began to code primitive web pages using notepad, and the free FTP program that came on a CD with the book (I still use that program today). My first web site, Colony Alpha, was supposed to be what Frontier Pop is now, in a few ways, and I used my ISP, Concentric, and its free hosting account to house it. It didn’t even have a domain name, and I wouldn’t obtain my first domain name until 2001. I had friends get on my case about not having a domain name, of course, but I was learning. I will say that friends such as Kitty and Ken from Florida-Models.Com were a great help, and they helped me get my very first web page online.
Colony Alpha was an online community for artists, years before web 2.0 social media came into existence. This was web 1.0, baby, and times were great. This was the time where most of the people who were on the Internet were smart, and there was a lot of good information on the Internet because the people who were there had earned the right, through knowledge and work, to be there. The web was not cluttered with all of the nonsense that it is cluttered with today.
Colony Alpha was successful, although without strong branding, and a domain name, not to mention a primitive design, it could only go so far. It was ambitious, and ahead of its time, but ultimately, limited. This was, after all, my first web site, and its ambitions were beyond my technical ability at the time.
My first time on the Internet, Christmas day 1997, was spent on my brother’s computer at his apartment, on his AOL account. I was as newbie as they came. I remember typing in web site URL’s into the AOL search engine box, and wondering why I couldn't get onto the web sites. I quickly figured it out, and soon was reading sites as fast as I could find them.
I was hooked.
I didn’t have a computer at the time, so I turned one of my Sega Saturn’s into an “Internet” computer the next day. I went to EB Games at the Brandon Town Center Mall, and bought two Saturn Net Link 28.8 modem cartridges that they were liquidating, as well as a Saturn Keyboard adapter. I bought a computer keyboard, cobbled my Internet set up together, obtained a concentric account that came with my Net Link, and used a television as a monitor. Until I obtained my first computer in late 1998, this was my daily means to access the Internet, and primarily explore, and read, web sites.
In that first week, I found a site called “Florida Models”. I Emailed the owner, a model named Kitty, who was in the Tampa Bay area, and we started talking. Soon, Kitty and her boyfriend Ken not only taught me a lot about the modeling industry, but about web sites, too. Kitty twisted my arm to get a computer, learn HTML, and create a web site.
In late 1998, I went down to Circuit City in Brandon, and paid $800.00 for a then-state-of-the-art computer, a 266 MHZ IBM with 32 Megs of RAM, a 4 Gig hard drive, a 56K modem, and running Windows 98. That first weekend, I spent every waking hour online, downloading video game emulators and starting an emulation collection which is still growing today. I also started typing HTML, and began putting together Colony Alpha.
Colony Alpha was an entertainment and art web site which my event planning and photography companies would be marketed from. The menu organization, however, was confusing, and as a marketing platform, it had issues. As a colony for artists, however, it did well. I had photographers, models, sculptors, poets, actors, talent, and writers on there. There were several people who were even using their profiles as their web site.
Colony Alpha lasted just over a year, with some of the artists leaving, and soon I was working on specialized business marketing sites. My first generation of web site development was underway.
By 2002, I had a significant web presence with an array of web site, including a powerful site called Independent Modeling. My armada of web sites grew as my web sites began their second generation, with image mapping, meta tags, and other features. Around this time, too, I began using web development programs such as Dreamweaver, which made my web sites much more sophisticated.
In 2005, I had a ton of web sites, and my third generation of web site development began. I was doing complex layouts, advanced SEO, mouse-over graphics, and using CSS for web site design and updates. The third generation of web site development is still going on, and will phase into fourth generation, which is flash graphics, interactive layouts, modular site construction, scalable site design, and PHP Databasing in 2011.
In 2003, I obtained a series of domain names. I obtained one for my Frontier Society subculture, which had been around since 1993, but it languished in development hell, and eventually, I messed up transferring it. A cybersquatter quickly bought it, and tried to sell it back to me for $1,600.00. I passed, and bought up an alternative version of it with a hyphen, which was nowhere near as marketable. An unsavory Internet marketer then bought up every possible domain name incarnations of my Frontier Society brand, making my less-than-marketable domain name a risky move in a mindfield of domain names; they were banking on the fact that my site visitors would stumble onto their sites by mis-typing my Frontier Society name.
My Frontier Society site would be the second attempt, and it came in 2007. The less than ideal hyphenated domain name, however, crippled that effort, although the site had some revolutionary ideas. Many of those ideas were incorporated into Frontier Pop.
Regarding Frontier Society, I needed a simple domain name, a domain name which would be compatible with the Frontier Society site, but which could also be used to market every site that I had. So, in the Spring of 2010, that domain name came to me. Frontier Pop. Frontier Pop was an even better marketing name than Frontier Society, too.
Frontier Pop was not only genius, but it also could be used to market my Frontier Society subculture, driving traffic to my Frontier Society site, and content creation (To date, this is a work in progress, as the Frontier Society site needs to be redone before this can begin). So, as a byproduct, the person who is trying to capitalize on my Frontier Society brand is now sitting on a pile of worthless domain names. This alone makes me laugh, as their scheme had backfired. Simply put, I outsmarted the bastard.
Frontier Pop is more, too. I will be used to market every web site property that I own. It will tie everything together. Frontier Pop will also be an important tie-in with my event planning and stage production companies, my Tampa Bay talent resource sites, Tampa Bay Film, and my industry resource sites.
Frontier Pop, primarily, though, is a weekly online magazine covering entertainment, pop culture, cool things, and current events. Frontier Pop will also contain editorial content, blog content, articles, features, and resources. It is pretty much what Colony Alpha aspired to be, and my original concept comes full circle.
Frontier Pop is also my first web site to fully incorporate web 2.0 social media support, and although I am far from a fan of the mass ignorance which social media / networking sites enable, you have to go where the people are to promote your site. Frontier Pop, too, although it is one of the last of my third generation sites, was designed to be easily upgradable to a fourth generation site. So, Frontier Pop will evolve, too, as time goes on.
What is the Frontier Pop mission statement? Will, it’s similar to the mission statement of the DJ. The mission of Frontier Pop is to break cool, new things to the reader, as well as explore some great things about pop culture and the past. It will educate while being entertaining, and in time, will be fully intergrated into Frontier Society, using my older site as a database.
So, a new era in my online life begins. Enjoy it!