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Fandom as a Time-Consuming Passion
Fandom as a Time-Consuming Passion
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fan.pub@lacon3.worldcon.org
![[L.A.con III]](http://www.boston-baden.com/hazel/Pix/phineas_gage_1868.gif){kind=small}
From July 1994 to November 1996 I ran
the
Fan Publicity Department
for
L.A.con III, the 1996
Worldcon. There were basically two subdepartments, and I was in charge of
both of them. First, there's printing up and mailing out flyers and
ads and notices and so forth; second, there's our Internet presence.
Check out our L.A.con III Home Page and see some of the things we
did. My philosophy on the Net end of things has been to make sure that
anything the convention committee makes public will be available
electronically. This covers a lot of territory, from the fire regulations
that the dealers have to worry about, to the rules in the Masquerade.
I've started writing up my experience, in a series of articles entitled
Webmastering the Worldcon.
Just for fun I added links to the
home pages
of
some members of L.A.con III; if you're a member and you'd like me to add
you in, drop me email at my L.A.con III address:
fan.pub@lacon3.worldcon.org.
While the convention is over, we've still been adding material to the site, such as dance playlists, convention reports from various fans, and pictures.
I started the
Fan
Funds Home Page, but now it's in Roxanne Smith-Graham's capable hands.
Originally as part of the L.A.con III web site, I started keeping track of current
Worldcon and NASFiC Bids.
About halfway through my stint as Webmaster for L.A.con III, the WSFS Mark
Protection Committee took the necessary steps to register the domain names
worldcon.org and wsfs.org.
Blars was
kind enough to donate use of an entire server dedicated to the cause for
our subdomain lacon3.worldcon.org, and we took full advantage of that.
As one of the results of the incredible popularity of
lacon3.worldcon.org
and
worldcon.org,
we've been
asked to set up something similar for the Westercons. The result
is
www.westercon.org.
There is also a list of
Westercon and other
Regional Convention Bids
on that server.
In 1996, the winning bid for the 1999 Worldcon was Aussiecon 3, to be held
in Australia. This meant that there would most likely be a NASFiC held in
1999, and the vote would be held in 1997. In 1997,
the WSFS MPC decided to launch
nasfic.org, set up much the same way as
worldcon.org, so that after the vote there could be a nasfic.org sub-domain.
The winning 1999 NASFiC bid had asked me to run their web page, and
so had "Chicago in 2000" so I worked up a new design for such web pages,
based on my experience with lacon3.worldcon.org. If you compare the two
pages, you'll probably note several similiarities.
Conucopia, the 1999 North American
Science Fiction Convention
will be a smaller, shorter, and simpler
convention than
Chicon 2000, the 58th World Science Fiction Convention.
But the two websites
are designed the same way. The emphasis is on maximum content, fast
loading times, small file sizes, browser compatibility, ease of
maintenance, and portability. You won't find
a lot of graphics on the pages. There's a modest amount of technical
expertise going on behind the scenes; for example, those button icons
update every night to indicate how many days until the convention. The
"new/updated" icons automatically fade away and disappear on their own...
One of the things I've done to reduce filesizes is to strictly limit how
many links have to appear on every single page - because if M links have
to appear on N pages, you've just added M*N lines of HTML code to the
site. No sub-page
is more than two clicks away from any other sub-page, because every single
sub-page is listed on the Table of Contents (some would call it a Site
Map). Another subtle thing I've done is to determine in what order every
potential departmental page will appear, so all I have to do is go to the
Table of Contents and de-comment the corresponding line and the page
magically appears.
Eventually Blars had to shut down the server he'd allowed us to use for lacon3.worldcon.org.
Considering the web site ran from two years before the convention, until
two years after it, he was very generous with his time and resources.
David Dyer-Bennet
offered to host the site, which is where it continues
in its archival state. (In other words, it's now located on the same
server as this page.)
In 1998, I received e-mail inviting me to be Fan Guest of Honor at Windycon 26. So, in November 1999, we'll be flying to Chicago for my first GoH spot. Their web page says
"As we stand on the cusp of a new millennium, it seems right that we should recognize the technology that Science Fiction dreamed of and Science made reality. The best example of that technology is right here, in the Internet and the world wide web. The personal information terminal made its appearance in Science Fiction of the 1940's and was considered impossible fiction by the readers of that time, yet here we are, sitting in our living rooms connected to the world. Join us this year for the Techno WindyCon as we explore the technology and magic of Science Fiction and Fantasy."So I guess they decided I was the person to represent this, from the fan point of view. Wish me luck!
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