In another of our self-serving web celebrations, August 2004 marked the 10th year since we created the DirectorWeb, a resource site for users of Macromedia Director.
We have an irregular scrapbook of the site showing some its evolution– this was an early lesson on that in the rush to create new content, iin web site development we rarely keep records of the work, and there ought to be a more portfolio practice embedded there.
Launched well before Macromedia had their own web site, for many years DirectorWeb was our number one trafficked web site, mainly for people using our search interface to the Direct-L listserv. I put a good amount of time into this because Director was my main multimedia development tool through the 1990s, and had the good fortune, thanks to the exposure of this site, to get in on the beta test for the first release of Shockwave (director plugin for a web browser).
In those days, an active listserv like Direct-L was a true internet community, with free exchanges, idea sharing, personality wars, flames, etc. and I got to remotely know a number of colleagues (like crossing paths with D’Arcy Norman long ago, well before learning objects, blogs, etc).
Director has faded some in flavor of Flash, and I have not seen the inside of a Lingo script for 3+ years. But the site is still very active, mostly people scanning the “What’s New” links on the front page. We have pretty much automated this, so a lot of content comes in steadily (from where?) and we have a home grown web interface for managing all the content into the site.
This moment of nostalgia has been brought to you by… memories of multimedia programming in the “old” days.
