Leedberg.com

This website originally went online sometime in 1995, as "GL Soft Online". This was my first website ever, and was designed just to allow me to distribute the software I was writing on the web. At this point in time, it was hosted on America Online, which at the time gave members one megabyte of storage.

After GL Soft Online, I made a website, Motaro's MK Page, which had all sorts of information about the video game Mortal Kombat. Motaro's MK Page went online on October 28th, 1995, and actually became one of the more popular MK pages, even being mentioned in some print magazines. This site is actually still online, although it has not been touched since 1997 (it still gets a significant number of hits every day, though!).

In addition to Motaro's MK Page, I went on to create Seinfeld Online. Seinfeld Online was, obviously, a Seinfeld fan site, and is still online because traffic to it continues, but has not been updated in many years.

In the spring of 1996, I created Green Day: Top Floor. This was a fan site for the band Green Day.

After creating Green Day: Top Floor, I realized that one megabyte was not enough to hold all my ever-growing pages. So, I set up an account with SimpleNet, which at the time offered unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth for $10 a month. My virtual webserver was given the name greg.simplenet.com. I moved Motaro's MK Page, Seinfeld, and Green Day: Top Floor to the new webhost around July 19, 1996, and put GL Soft Online to rest. Once I moved there, I made my first top-level page, so that when you went to greg.simplenet.com, you were presented with a list of links to the sites hosted there.

On greg.simplenet.com, my site grew quickly, and I made several new sites. The first of these was The Web Gone MAD, a very popular and active site about Mad Magazine, which went online in the fall of 1996.

In April of 1997, I created what would go on to be one of my most popular websites ever -- The MIDI Mirage. The MIDI Mirage hosted freely available MIDI files, but the different between Mirage and the multitude of other MIDI sites was that all MIDIs were screened by me first, and only quality files were posted. In December, 1997, I found myself in the holiday spirit, and so created a Christmas-themed website, Christmas On The Web, which was only actively updated for that one holiday season.

The only significant change to Greg.simplenet.com in 1998 came in the summer, when I designed the website for my church, and hosted it there. Updates to my active sites continued.

In 1999, I started my (still continuing) artifical intelligence project, Billy. In December, I put my software online with the website "The Billy Project". In early 2000, The Billy Project morphed into Greg Leedberg Software Creations, so that I could make more of my software available as well (you may consider this the return of the original GL Soft Online website from 1995!).

In December 2000, SimpleNet was bought by Yahoo!, and all accounts were required to register true domain names. So, I registered Leedberg.com, and that is the address I have had ever since.

By 2001, updates to Green Day: Top Floor had stopped, and traffic had as well. So in January, I officially took it offline.

In August 2001, I started the site I had been dreaming of doing for a long time -- a news/opinion site, called Yellow Journalism. Unfortunately, Yellow was only actively updated for a couple months (although the content remains online).

In September, 2001, amid many lawsuits on behalf of the music industry (as digital music was becoming more prevalent), and as I saw MP3 starting to replace MIDI, I made the (huge) decision to take The MIDI Mirage down.

On August 14, I completely re-designed the top-level Leedberg.com site (what had previously been a list of links to hosted sites). For the first time ever, Leedberg.com had actual content. Thanks to Blogger, the top level site became a personal blog for me (while still containing a sidebar of site links). At the same time, my church's website and Christmas On The Web were taken offline.

Also for the first time ever, my website began to run paid ads (from Google). I decided to do this because all of the work going into my sites (particularly my AI project) was starting to add up, and I felt that Google text ads were a non-annoying way to recoup some of the money required to run a website and develop software. Ads were retro-actively added to every site still online which did not violate Google's terms of service.

On January 13, some small modifications were made to the top-level site to give it more content, and also to de-emphasive my older sites. Now, Leedberg.com no longer directly links to the sites hosted here (many of which are no longer active). Several pages were added, including a profile/resume page, a computers page, this history page, and a page of links to the hosted sites.

Later, June 16 was another significant day in Leedberg.com history. I moved Leedberg.com from being hosted with Yahoo!, to being hosted by DreamHost. There were many, many reasons for this big switch, but most of all DreamHost was just a better value and had more of the features I wanted. Since DreamHost supported PHP and MySQL, all message boards were converted over to the PhpBB system. Also, Yellow Journalism was taken offline as part of this move since it didn't generate much traffic anymore, and its dynamic nature would have been very difficult to move. Luckily, there were no major problems in moving the site to DreamHost.