Site History
Current Stats:
Brer-Rabbit.com
Opened May 14, 2010
Brer-Rabbit.com originally opened May 9, 2001 under the name Brer Rabbit Stew. The name came from a line in Song of the South. I was at the tender age of 15 1/2 when I first opened it up.
- Brer Rabbit Stew in it’s first inception.
We first started out on Tripod, in a sub-folder of an account for another site I had there. As you can see, the layout was minimalist, since all I had to work with at this point was MS Paint and some clip art I had found on the internet. The articles were slightly informative, but very sounded very juvenile. This version lasted roughly a year and a half, until I decided to get the site its own space, and changed the layout during the move.
- Second layout
This version is still pretty minimalist, but at the same time a little more advanced. A friend of mine, who is a wiz in Photoshop, offered to help me with the graphics by cleaning up the main image of Brer Rabbit and creating the header. I also had received Paint Shop Pro for Christmas that year, so I was beginning to learn how to create graphics for myself at last.
This version was also right around the time the site actually began to take off — I was receiving comments from people that it was being used as an educational resource, a concept that I hadn’t actually expected or taken into account before. It was also when I was approached for my first interview, with MetroBEAT. I was beginning to see its true potential, which is why I decided to take it down for hiatus to redesign it…
…And didn’t return for seven more years. Ouch. In that time, I graduated high school, held my first job, went to college, moved to the other side of the country, moved back to this side of the country, and generally experienced the beginnings of adulthood. The domain, brer-rabbit.com, was actually purchased in 2007, but I would sit on it until early 2009, when I decided it was time to get the ball rolling on bringing it back. Unfortunately, it would be another year after that before I even settled on how to run the site (a WordPress blog), and come up with a suitable design (I have many different attempts sitting on my computer of concepts that just didn’t sit well with me).
I am happy with the version that sits before us today. Though it took a long, long time to bring it back, I think it was still perfect timing, as I believe I am more capable now than ever to run this site the way it deserves to be run. I look forward to what the future brings for it.
