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whoa is (not) me: Defending Keanu, Deciphering Reeves

"Time goes much slower when you're moving at around 130 mph."

- The Anu on time.

AAAAAAHHHHHHH

WINM SITE HISTORY


A long time ago (January 2008) on a website not that far away (IMDb.com)...

WINM and the Keanu SWAT Team came into solid existence on the 11th of January, 2008. Well actually we sort of existed prior to that; we just didn't have a cool name.

...Though technically we only started to be known as the Keanu SWAT Team some time later, and initially were just known as that bunch of sad losers who spent all their time trying to defend that guy with the sucky English accent from Bram Stoker's Dracula.

...And admittedly some people still know us as that. But that's not important.

This site was created by Anakin McFly over the period of four days, and it was too green and hurteth the eye:

And ckage saw that it was too green and hurteth the eye, and said so.

So the colour scheme was edited to more trunk than leaf, and the site was launched onto the Internets and advertised in all sorts of places. Due to a lack of money, WINM had to be hosted on a free web host, and its first address was http://www.freewebtown.com/whoaisnotme. Clicking on that link will just redirect you back here, so don't bother.

And there was evening, and there was morning - the first day.

People visited the site and gave nice comments. This was nice. Other people mistook it for a Keanu hate site. This was not so nice.

And there was evening, and there was morning - the second day.

And the third day.

And then on the fourth day, the hit count spiked up to over 680 and nearly killed the webmaster with a heart attack. Further investigation revealed this to be the cause:

And Anakin McFly spent the rest of the week being ecstatic and scaring people by being violently happy at them.

And there was evening, and there was morning - the fourth day.

On the 21st of January, WINM got linked from the Club-Keanu homepage, though it no longer is. The WINM Forums saw life on the 26th of February, and two days later the archived raids of the Keanu SWAT Team were put up on the website.

WINM as of 14th April 2008:

WINM was linked at Wikipedia under the Keanu Reeves article. This created another spike in site traffic and made the webmaster happy.

On the 17th of April, WINM was mentioned in a column in New Jersey's largest newspaper. Sadly, after they revamped their site and cleared their backlog, the article is no longer available on the site itself, and its only copy is up on the WINM forums.

WINM was removed from Wikipedia for being spam. This made the webmaster unhappy.

On the 21st of April, KeanuWeb - at that point the largest fansite in the fandom - shut down after fourteen years of being online. Keanu fandom was collectively sadface.

The WINM blog went online on the 13th of May.

WINM got another layout revamp on the 18th of July to a three-column format.

And after much hassle and angst and frustration on the part of the webmaster, directed towards things from PayPal to various domain name registration places, on the 2nd of September - Keanu's 44th birthday - WINM left FreeWebTown and struck out on its own into the dangers of the Internet with its own domain - WhoaIsNotMe.Net:

And later I ditched the three column format:

After Club-Keanu crashed later that September, I offered to help rebuild its articles archive. Once that was done I realised that there was no point in stopping there, and continued collecting articles that people had been sending in and those that I discovered from other parts of the Internet. Thus WINM evolved from a mere defence site to also incorporate what is currently the largest online archive of Keanu Reeves articles and interviews.

I linked the archive from Wikipedia. This time it stayed up.

As the site became more articles-focused, I moved up the article updating thing:

And then one day, in a fit of web-design creativity, I decided it would be a great idea to revamp the entire site.

I decided to spend my first ever summer vacation - May-July 2009 - teaching myself PHP programming. Having skimmed through the basics while away on holiday in December 2008, I got down to learning PHP proper towards the end of April 2009, while term was technically not yet over. It filled my study breaks; and by early May I had managed to program a basic users system for the site, allowing people to create accounts and add articles to favourites lists.

And the dinosaurs came.

Time passed, I spent too much time on programming sites, and as I grew in the Force my PHP knowledge I managed to create other things for the site - such as enabling comments for articles, and the Keanu Movie Database - using just one PHP script for that instead of what would have amounted to over 50 HTML pages.

A lecture at university on pictograms inspired me to pictogramise Keanu films for the lulz. WINM thus became slightly more image-heavy.

And later:

So yeah; at present, this is more or less where it's at. I continue to use it as proof that fandom was not a waste of time; in the course of running this site, my web design skills improved by about ten times, I actually taught myself PHP, and this will probably come in useful some time in my university and/or working life seeing as how I'm majoring in Communications & New Media. Things I've learnt in lectures have found their way into this site, and my experience with this has helped me in class; in other words, fandom is totally educational.