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

- The Anu on time.

winm site history

January 2008

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.

14 April 2008

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 and gave angry comments or cheerfully agreed. 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 due to being featured on the front page of KeanuWeb.

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 at the free forums host invisionfree.com; and two days later, the archived raids of the Keanu SWAT Team were put up on the website.

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.

The WINM blog went online on the 13th of May.
2nd September 2008

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.

The site was launched from a laptop perched in an awkward position on an endtable, the webmaster sitting on the bed in a poky little dorm room at college. Weird Al Yankovich's "Hardware Store" played in the background. Midnight passed. WINM.net was live.

Late 2008 / Early 2009

And later I ditched the three column format, moving all menu items to the left to give more space for the middle bit.

After Club-Keanu crashed later that September of 2008, 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 to the front page, reinstating the three-column format.

From its initial plain-text format, the articles archive also got redesigned. I separated them by years into roughly equal portions, created banners for the lot, and experimented with that cool background thing because I thought it was awesome. I then embarked on the massive quest to tag all the 840+ articles by hand, tagging each with the movies and other subjects they focused on. This took a very long time and made my wrists hurt.

13 February 2009

And then one day, in a fit of web-design creativity, I decided it would be a great idea to revamp the entire site, and this design was launched on the 13th of February 2009, a year and a month after WINM first came into existence.

Separate banners were created for the top-right corners of the various sections - Home, Defending Keanu, Characters, Articles and Miscellaneous.

1 May 2009

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.

8 July 2009

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.

For the first time, I also gave WINM a fixed-width layout instead of the previous fluid layout, making things more compact and consistent for viewing.

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

20 October 2009

I simplified the navigation a little, removing the top level list of buttons and incorporating those links into the main and sub menus. I added a Dogstar section to the site, with music and lyrics.

Eventually, I also programmed the forums from scratch and made them into a part of the site. Due to my general lack of advanced skills, the forums were pretty straightforward at first - just giving members the ability to start threads and add posts to them.

I liked having complete control over the code and design, and made the forums follow some vague virtual world format whereby each board described a different section of the Keanu SWAT Team's headquarters: the front desk, tech support, library, offices, ready room, and so on. The descriptions are still here as of April 2011, though the accompanying pictures no longer are.

Meanwhile on the main page, I started using actual pictures to accompany news articles - usually those where photos or scans accompanied the article.

22 December 2009

In December 2009, I tried to aim for a more standard professional look and revamped the site again, abandoning the tree-based colour scheme for all black emo-ness and goldenrod trimmings. This design actually spawned from a vague desire to create a Zachary Quinto fansite called Quintology.net, just for the name; I had ideas for a fairly in-depth site similar to WINM, articles archive and all, and had come up with something similar to this design for it with a black/white/goldenrod colour scheme.

Eventually, I decided that running two huge fansites would be too much work and abandoned that idea (I did eventually launch Quintology.net, but just as a feed aggregator compiling updates from various fan sites rather than a full-blown site itself), but still wanted to use that design and colour scheme, and so WINM got it instead after some tweaking.

With the help of some edited Javascript code I found online, I also created a bunch of banners and set them to rotate with each new page or refresh; I kept adding on to them, and there were over 40 at the end.

10 August 2010

Later, I decided that dark green text on white was easier to read than goldenrod text on black, and went back to the faithful #003300 and #002200 greens for trimmings and text that I'd been using since earlier incarnations of the site.

10 December 2010

The site got another layout revamp in December 2010, in an attempt to leave the emo phase and counter Sad Keanu's sadness with a brighter look.

Colour scheme and menu placement was changed; banners no longer rotated, though there was one new one for each section. Apart from that, though, content went generally unchanged.

15 April 2011

In April 2011, I took a web design class and was forced to face the terrible coding habits that I had for some time been vaguely aware of but never really did anything about. This then led to the biggest - structural-wise - revamp of the site, removing bits of redundant and useless code and reorganising the site. I also tried to unclutter the home page and make things cleaner and more streamlined, and managed to sort everything under just the main menu.

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.

January 2008
	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.
14 April 2008
	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 and gave angry comments or cheerfully agreed. 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 due to being featured on the front page of KeanuWeb. 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 at the free forums host invisionfree.com; and two days later, the archived raids of the Keanu SWAT Team were put up on the website. 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. The WINM blog went online on the 13th of May.
2nd September 2008
	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. The site was launched from a laptop perched in an awkward position on an endtable, the webmaster sitting on the bed in a poky little dorm room at college. Weird Al Yankovich's "Hardware Store" played in the background. Midnight passed. WINM.net was live.
Late 2008 / Early 2009
	And later I ditched the three column format, moving all menu items to the left to give more space for the middle bit. After Club-Keanu crashed later that September of 2008, 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 to the front page, reinstating the three-column format. From its initial plain-text format, the articles archive also got redesigned. I separated them by years into roughly equal portions, created banners for the lot, and experimented with that cool background thing because I thought it was awesome. I then embarked on the massive quest to tag all the 840+ articles by hand, tagging each with the movies and other subjects they focused on. This took a very long time and made my wrists hurt.
13 February 2009
	And then one day, in a fit of web-design creativity, I decided it would be a great idea to revamp the entire site, and this design was launched on the 13th of February 2009, a year and a month after WINM first came into existence. Separate banners were created for the top-right corners of the various sections - Home, Defending Keanu, Characters, Articles and Miscellaneous.
1 May 2009
	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.
8 July 2009
	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. For the first time, I also gave WINM a fixed-width layout instead of the previous fluid layout, making things more compact and consistent for viewing. A lecture at university on pictograms inspired me to pictogramise Keanu films for the lulz. WINM thus became slightly more image-heavy.
20 October 2009
	I simplified the navigation a little, removing the top level list of buttons and incorporating those links into the main and sub menus. I added a Dogstar section to the site, with music and lyrics. Eventually, I also programmed the forums from scratch and made them into a part of the site. Due to my general lack of advanced skills, the forums were pretty straightforward at first - just giving members the ability to start threads and add posts to them. I liked having complete control over the code and design, and made the forums follow some vague virtual world format whereby each board described a different section of the Keanu SWAT Team's headquarters: the front desk, tech support, library, offices, ready room, and so on. The descriptions are still here as of April 2011, though the accompanying pictures no longer are. Meanwhile on the main page, I started using actual pictures to accompany news articles - usually those where photos or scans accompanied the article.
22 December 2009
	In December 2009, I tried to aim for a more standard professional look and revamped the site again, abandoning the tree-based colour scheme for all black emo-ness and goldenrod trimmings. This design actually spawned from a vague desire to create a Zachary Quinto fansite called Quintology.net, just for the name; I had ideas for a fairly in-depth site similar to WINM, articles archive and all, and had come up with something similar to this design for it with a black/white/goldenrod colour scheme. Eventually, I decided that running two huge fansites would be too much work and abandoned that idea (I did eventually launch Quintology.net, but just as a feed aggregator compiling updates from various fan sites rather than a full-blown site itself), but still wanted to use that design and colour scheme, and so WINM got it instead after some tweaking. With the help of some edited Javascript code I found online, I also created a bunch of banners and set them to rotate with each new page or refresh; I kept adding on to them, and there were over 40 at the end.
10 August 2010
	Later, I decided that dark green text on white was easier to read than goldenrod text on black, and went back to the faithful #003300 and #002200 greens for trimmings and text that I'd been using since earlier incarnations of the site.
10 December 2010
	The site got another layout revamp in December 2010, in an attempt to leave the emo phase and counter Sad Keanu's sadness with a brighter look. Colour scheme and menu placement was changed; banners no longer rotated, though there was one new one for each section. Apart from that, though, content went generally unchanged.
15 April 2011
	In April 2011, I took a web design class and was forced to face the terrible coding habits that I had for some time been vaguely aware of but never really did anything about. This then led to the biggest - structural-wise - revamp of the site, removing bits of redundant and useless code and reorganising the site. I also tried to unclutter the home page and make things cleaner and more streamlined, and managed to sort everything under just the main menu. 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.