The website started up sometime in early 2003. My first payment to Yahoo for site hosting was in April of that year, and the first updates listed on the update page come from February, so it probably went online that month. I'd dabbled with a few personal webpages previously; Zero had his own page in 1996 (complete with horrible textured background and animated gifs), but this was the first time I'd really had a specific purpose in making one: I wanted a site for furry macrophiles--more specifically growth-lovers--to enjoy, complete with stories, comics, and a multimedia file or two.
A few people were nice enough to write stories for me in those early days, as I hadn't written much myself yet. Ankhari's Choice, by Blackwolfe Coyoten, and Blue Sky Green, by Scott Grildrig, were a couple of favorites of mine. I've discovered a few more that I don't think have seen the light of day anywhere, so future blog post fodder!
The comics were, I think, one big reason why people visited. DNA's Free Lunch and Kit's Hocus Pocus were two early growth comics that got pretty big (as they should) at one-hundred-plus pages each. It was handy to have them all in one place, though my hand-coded navigation pages weren't the best!
The media files were also fun to display in the pre-YouTube days. Tex Avery's King Size Canary was there, along with clips from Sonic The Hedgehog, Rocko's Modern Life, and earlier influential classics--all blatant copyright violations, of course, but meant as a retrospective of all the size-changing that goes on in cartoons. And good grief, were they compressed to hell. There was a RealMedia (shiver) file of a Foxbusters episode clip four minutes long...with a 1.86 Mb file size. You can imagine the quality! Or maybe not...think of a postage stamp that moves occasionally and makes noise.
The supercompressed files were necessary to reduce bandwidth costs, of course. I got a certain amount of bandwidth with my plan, but going over that cost an extra $5 per gigabyte, or something similar. I didn't mind paying at all; I still considered what I was doing a cheap and fun hobby, but I did lay out about $1500 on bandwidth and hosting costs over the website's seven-year lifespan. Again, not a huge amount, but definitely not free, and it's why I tend to just give a (sometimes forced) smile when people complain on and on about websites they don't have to pay for. Whoops, almost tripped over a soap box! Who put that there...
The other reason I think a lot of people enjoyed the site was the Flash game. Again, this was BlackWolfe Coyoten's work--a DDR-type Flash game where you tried to make Mataki (via a vectorized image of a piece of art done by Moonstalker) bigger to the beat of Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger." Who knew making a wolf grow could be such a motivator to keep playing? This is actually the one part of the site that still exists online! You can play it at the link below thanks to Rooth and his online presence, but hurry...Flash support ends at the close of 2020!
The site was fun to maintain, but eventually, as FurAffinity became an easy way for artists to display their own work, and as YouTube because an easy to share videos, a dedicated site for such things (that required me coding and paying for) became less and less attractive, and I shut it down around April 2010, ten years ago now.
I am still pleasantly surprised and amazed by how many people remember it and comment that it was their first big introduction to macrofurry world. That makes me really happy, and it makes everything that I put into the site so worth it. Thank you, each and every one of you who have told me over the years how much it meant to you! It's something I will always look back on fondly, and I am glad to have given back to the community that helped me find out a lot about myself.
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