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Saturday, December 15, 2007

Valley of the Geeks was conceived and written by Zack "Where’s the spec?" Urlocker and designed and implemented by Ben "What’s a spec?" Riga in 2002. The site was developed on a Cray-1 computer we got on eBay, super-cooled with Starbucks Frappucinno. Total budget for the site is less than the price of Akamai stock at its peak. All of the writing is original fictional satire copyright (c) 2002-2005 M. Zack Urlocker. If you like the site, tell your friends. If you don't, tell your enemies. If you find typos or errors, please email us and we'll fix it.

If you’d like to link to the site, please use the buttons we've created to link to the home page. You can also support the site through the Amazon Honor System.   

The site content is managed using Fog Creek Software’s great^h^h^h^h^h languishing CityDesk system. This is a great tool and it made the entire project manageable.  You can get a trial version free from their site. (Unfortunately, it seems software guru Joel Spolsky is no longer planning on delivering the long promised upgrade to CityDesk 3.0 in 2004, so I can't in good faith recommend this anymore.)

The book is published by iUniverse, a cool company that uses technology to cut traditional publishing time frames from months down to weeks. If you've ever thought about publishing a book on your own, this is the place to go.

The RTFM Store is powered by CafePress.com and works great. Heck, if this was 1999, we’d have filed our IPO by now on the basis of t-shirt sales alone. Plus we have these really cool RTFM coffee mugs. Lookout eBay!

The logo was done by Patrick O’Keefe at iFroggyDesign. He does excellent work very fast, sometimes before I even ask for it. Also, O’Keefe is a beer in Canada, which is a big plus.

With all of our traffic we outgrew our old hosting service which ran on a Commodore 64. We upgraded to Yahoo GeoCities which gives us more bandwidth and fast. Even under peak loads, performance is awesome!

We're using FreeLists for the Votg newsletter. It's got a user interface only a mother could love, but it's entirely ad-free, no spam ever.  In fact, I don't even send out newsletters anymore!

Finally, if you're really a complete geek, you can get an RSS syndicated content news feed of this site at http://www.valleyofthegeeks.com/rss.xml. This will enable you to use NewzCrawler or other tools to automatically get updates every time we post them to the site and view them along side other news channels like Wired, ZDNet and Slashdot. You can also view the newsfeed at TheSchmews and SatireSearch. If you don't know about news channels, weblogs and all that, don't worry about it. If you do know, you may want to consider getting out a bit more.