About 5 1/2 years ago I first got hooked up to the internet. At the time, Yahoo was something they hollered at the local rodeo and my computer took about 5 minutes to load a page. I'd find a page I wanted to check out with the worst search engine I ever used, called WebCrawler, click on it and go read the paper a while waiting for it to load. I think I was using a 0.1bps modem and had a XT series computer. A Gig? Heck, that was something a band got for Saturday night. And my computer didn't have any Intel inside. There wasn't even any intel on the outside using it.
I started finding some pretty cool web sites (even a blind pig finds...) and began to wonder how I might make a site. But I couldn't figure out for the life of me how I might get a web site. Then one day in January of '96 I stumbled on this place called GeoCities. Free websites! Even a template to fill in with some graphics (I used a lit bomb graphic, still don't know why, just used it because I couldn't figure out what else to use). Now what can I do a site about?
I poked around at GeoCities for a few days, checked out the neighborhoods and finally settled on MotorCity. Since there were only about a 100 sites total in the MotorCity Neighborhood and they had a 1000 addresses I pretty much had my choice of addresses. The #'s ran from 1000-9999 and since 1017 (17 for Hamby's #) was already taken I went with 1071 in honor of Dave Marcis, the last independent. So now I had a site and figured it was time I started a little site to brag about my years in NASCAR racing. I couldn't figure out what else to put on MY web site so that seemed like the likely thing to do.
I typed up a page telling about my experiences and the drivers I worked with and then sat back to see what would happen. A week later I think I had about 10 visitors. Then I realized that if I was going to interest people in coming back, or visiting in the first place, I needed to add something new. So I typed up my "Drivers" page and made a list of every driver I had met or worked with and what I thought of them. Two weeks into the great "Stooge's Nascar Page" I was up to about 25 visitors. Wow! I was flying now!
Only problem? Well, with a total of 2 pages on my site there just wasn't a lot of reason to come back after taking 10 minutes to read what was there. So I sat and pondered how I could get my second 25 visitors and with the Daytona 500 coming up I came up with the brilliant idea of critiquing the race when they ran it.
Five years later I hit my single day's greatest "hits" of a little over 15,000 in one day. But it just wasn't fun anymore. I was spending more time figuring out how to get "hits" then I was in just writing for fun like I had over the previous five years. And I just wasn't having fun anymore!
So now I've decided that I'm going back to having fun. I don't care if I only get 25 hits in a week. I'm just not going to worry about hits. I'm not going to worry about whether I get a new article up every two days. I don't even care if nobody reads my page or drops me a line to say they do. I'm just going to write a race report every week and if I have anything else to say during the week, I will. If not... well, who cares.
So starting next week look for a race report on the Firecracker 400. Other than that, I ain't promising a thing. I'm just here for fun.
The Stooge Returns!