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Many of you who are newer to the site may not understand the personal aspect of this website in my life. Here's the story of www.ay-ziggy-zoomba.com so far.
Originally I think it was just an experiment to see if I COULD do it. I owned a domain name and had a website, but had never done anything "interactive" with it, so I bought and downloaded some bulletin board software (DCForums) and got it up and running. I didn't really want to talk only with myself though, so I set it up with my dad (the biggest Falcon Fan I've known to this day -- sorry Freak) in mind (BGHoward) and he told a few of his friends about it, billing it as a place to talk about BGSU sports online and it grew from there. http://www.pepperguy.com/ayziggy was the original URL I believe.
It didn't take long and friends told friends and there were 20, 30, then 50 regular members of the site. It looked like there was a need, so I decided to buy another domain name and take the site out on its own. Dad and I went back and forth between gobg.com and ay-ziggy-zoomba.com... I actually won that battle, thinking gobg.com looked funny.
I think I registered the domain name in 2001...pretty early in the year. Dad was sick with his second bout with cancer, but he really enjoyed being involved with things. He was getting so excited about starting a regular column after his surgery to remove the metastatic cancer from his liver. His first one was going to be a how-to article on creating a Falcon helmet out of an old construction worker's helmet.
Well, he never recovered from that surgery... he died on April 27, 2001. I vividly remember going back to the hotel that night in Columbus and posting the news on the site... My dad was one of the biggest early advocates of the site and when he died, I made a promise with myself to keep it going in his honor.
Well, in the past 5 years since dad has been gone, the site has gone through some changes and some amazing growth!! Well over 1000 registered users, 436,426 visits and 24,174,433 hits in 2005...it boggles my MIND!! The site has changed hosts out of necessity because the traffic was so heavy... I've run out of bandwidth allotment more than once... there have been growing pains, to be sure! Then Mike Williams contacted me and ended up putting together this gorgeous design that makes this the best looking fan-run site on the Internet... fantastic!!
I'm proud of this website. I'm proud that it's fan run, fan owned and fan directed! I have made a lot of contacts, I have scooped the news agencies, YOU ALL have contributed to a site with more information on BG sports than has ever been available in the past!! To think this all grew out of an experiment with HTML!
Having grown this site from its infancy to where it is today, I feel like the site is a reflection on me, I like to think it reflects my character, my values, my vision... maybe that shouldn't be the case, but it is. I don't like to settle for mediocrity...
Maybe I set my expectations too high, but I don't think so. I'm glad the days wading through 25 crappy posts to find anything of substance are mostly behind us now. "But Grant, that's just the way the Internet is anymore." Well, that's not the way I want this site to be. It's that simple...
