Spaceships!

Something like 9 years ago, when I was a young grad student, I created a web page that was, at the time, the internet's only repository of spaceship images (thanks wayback machine!). I enjoyed putting it together, but inevitably, I eventually let it stagnate.

A funny thing happened, though. Even after years of neglecting this little page, I still got a steady stream of positive feedback. Total strangers were thanking me for putting together the page. After I moved to Baltimore and got my own domain, I reconstructed the page and named it the Spaceship Images Archive, but didn't really expand or improve it much. Still the comments and page hits kept coming.

A few years ago, I finally brought the SIA into the new millenium with things like CSS, but still the actual content remained vintage 1997 bits. And there it sat...for almost a decade.

And to this day, my apache logs show a near-constant stream of people checking out my spaceship images. I can literally watch people browsing in real time with "tail -f /var/log/apache/...". My site is the first listed when you google for 'spaceship images'.

I always felt kind of bad about neglecting the SIA, since it's apparently so popular. So I've finally done something about it. Today I relaunched the SIA again. This time it's based on Gallery 2, which makes browsing the images much nicer, and allows people attach comments to images. Best of all, I finally expanded the collection by adding screengrabs from several DVDs that I own. These are much higher quality than most of the existing collection.

Anyway, I kind of like this story of my little website, whose popularity I've never quite understood, but am constantly gratified by. Thank you, fellow sci-fi geeks everywhere...the SIA is for you!