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JTO Through the Years
Since its inception in February 1994, James Taylor Online has done quite a bit of growing up. Originally spawned as an offshoot of the Usenet newsgroup alt.music.james-taylor, the site has been expanded and revised continuously for more than ten years. Below you'll find a timeline of the site's various incarnations and milestones. Much of the information within the archived pages is now outdated and many of the links are now non-functional, but with that in mind read on...
- November 17, 1993 - My simple Usenet posting gets the ball rolling for alt.music.james-taylor, a newsgroup focusing on James Taylor. Usenet is much less of a force on the Internet today, but at the time it was the primary method of discussion on the net. I was an undergraduate at Florida State University at the time and the Internet was still largely populated by university students, researchers, and technology professionals.
- December 1993 - Discussion in the newsgroup grows steadily and I begin work on an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions), which is the Usenet standard of collecting information with the idea that it will head off having the same questions asked over and over as new readers arrive. The first public version of the FAQ wasn't much to look at.
- February 21, 1994 - The nascent world wide web is too much to resist, so I work up a none-too-impressive page about JT. The first version of James Taylor Online is announced via this Usenet posting. At the time the site is hosted in my student account at Florida State. See the archived version.
- June 1995 - A big fan of the web site HotWired, I send them an unsolicited article about my experiences launching the JT newsgroup and web site. They like it enough to publish it and later hire me to write for their NetSurf section.
- Early 1997 - JTO gets a seemingly Halloween-inspired redesign and navigation is moved to frames. See the archived version. It's also around this time that the site moves to the domain name james-taylor.com, which I first borrowed from the original owner and later bought outright. Around May the site also gets its first web-based discussion forum.
- December 1997 - News is now front and center and JT gets his first holiday-themed makeover. See the archived version.
- January 1999 - The frames are gone, never to return. See the archived version
- April 1999 - The color scheme changes to black on white along with the now-ubiquitous JTO shade of red called firebrick. There's also a new focus on shameless marketing of JT's CDs and videos. See the archived version. While visual tweaks and site expansions are never-ending, the overall look of the site remains largely unchanged through 2006.
- February 21, 2004 - JTO celebrates its 10th anniversary.
Joel Risberg, JTO Webmaster
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