What is YTMND?
I've spent more than a year trying to write the "about" page, and more importantly, trying to answer that question.
For a technical definition, I'll just steal the text from the wikipedia article:
The history of YTMND
It's hard to explain what YTMND is without giving you a little bit of history. In 2001 I saw a trailer for "Finding Forrester" in which Sean Connery declares the legendary line "You're the man now dog!". Around this time I was on a domain buying spree, so I immediately bought yourethemannowdog.com at the same time I bought dustindiamond.com, but we will get back to that later.
I went through a few revisions before finally selecting the current version of yourethemannowdog.com (the orignals didn't have sound!). With the help of Stile from Stileproject, I made a somewhat funny page for dustindiamond.com. Fast forward a few years. I get a cease and desist from Dustin Diamond, care of his lawyer. What ensued can only be referred to as hilarity. After much back and forth they filed a UDRP case to try and take the domain.
Around this time I started getting reports of people making spoofs of yourethemannowdog.com and after the fourth or fifth, I created a "contrib" list. When I spent some time looking I started to find quite a few of the spoofs being used for domain parking. Every day I was adding a few to the list, but sites were flaky so I started to mirror them as well. The list soon became too large and cumbersome to maintain. I came up with the idea to create a site where you could make your own spoof and I would host and link to it. On April 1, 2004 I purchased ytmnd.com. At the same time, my legal battle with Dustin Diamond was coming to an end. With the help of my mother and sister, I won the case and got to keep the domain. It remains relatively unchanged. My sister wanted to make a press release about the dustindiamond.com win as it was a precedent setting case. I asked her to mention the upcoming creation of YTMND in hopes it might springboard its popularity. Here is the press release and first mention of YTMND on the internet.
When the press release came out, I hadn't started YTMND at all. I spent six days feverishly coding and designing YTMND, on the seventh day, I rested. I launched ytmnd and my friends and family signed up. There were a lot of bugs and I was getting hosting from the company I worked at who had a cabinet at a datacenter. Within two weeks a user made picard.ytmnd.com and shot into the view of the public eye. I instantly realized I did not have the money to host a site that was getting as much traffic as it was, so I asked around and found someone to host all of the sounds and images for me. The host was unstable at best and it ended up causing a lot of downtime for YTMND. The images and sounds constantly stopped loading, this period was known as the "dark ages."
I took the site down in late 2004 as I had no way to host it, it was fun but I couldn't afford it. In April of 2005, by which I had more or less given up on YTMND, the owners of Reflected.net approached me about it. They told me they missed YTMND and were willing to host it until I could get back up on my feet. The rest is history. The site now makes enough of an income to pay for the massive amount of traffic it receives and pays for most of its new servers through site sponsorship and donations.
Ok, so what's YTMND?
YTMND is a site created for the purpose of furthering the creativity of its users. It stems from an idea that, using sound, and image, and some text, the users can convey a point, funny, political, or otherwise, to the general media.
I've spent more than a year trying to write the "about" page, and more importantly, trying to answer that question.
For a technical definition, I'll just steal the text from the wikipedia article:
- YTMND, an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!", is a website community that centers around the creation of YTMNDs, which are pages featuring a juxtaposition of a single image, optionally animated or tiled, along with large zooming text and a looping sound file. YTMND is also the general term used to describe any such site.
The history of YTMND
It's hard to explain what YTMND is without giving you a little bit of history. In 2001 I saw a trailer for "Finding Forrester" in which Sean Connery declares the legendary line "You're the man now dog!". Around this time I was on a domain buying spree, so I immediately bought yourethemannowdog.com at the same time I bought dustindiamond.com, but we will get back to that later.
I went through a few revisions before finally selecting the current version of yourethemannowdog.com (the orignals didn't have sound!). With the help of Stile from Stileproject, I made a somewhat funny page for dustindiamond.com. Fast forward a few years. I get a cease and desist from Dustin Diamond, care of his lawyer. What ensued can only be referred to as hilarity. After much back and forth they filed a UDRP case to try and take the domain.
Around this time I started getting reports of people making spoofs of yourethemannowdog.com and after the fourth or fifth, I created a "contrib" list. When I spent some time looking I started to find quite a few of the spoofs being used for domain parking. Every day I was adding a few to the list, but sites were flaky so I started to mirror them as well. The list soon became too large and cumbersome to maintain. I came up with the idea to create a site where you could make your own spoof and I would host and link to it. On April 1, 2004 I purchased ytmnd.com. At the same time, my legal battle with Dustin Diamond was coming to an end. With the help of my mother and sister, I won the case and got to keep the domain. It remains relatively unchanged. My sister wanted to make a press release about the dustindiamond.com win as it was a precedent setting case. I asked her to mention the upcoming creation of YTMND in hopes it might springboard its popularity. Here is the press release and first mention of YTMND on the internet.
When the press release came out, I hadn't started YTMND at all. I spent six days feverishly coding and designing YTMND, on the seventh day, I rested. I launched ytmnd and my friends and family signed up. There were a lot of bugs and I was getting hosting from the company I worked at who had a cabinet at a datacenter. Within two weeks a user made picard.ytmnd.com and shot into the view of the public eye. I instantly realized I did not have the money to host a site that was getting as much traffic as it was, so I asked around and found someone to host all of the sounds and images for me. The host was unstable at best and it ended up causing a lot of downtime for YTMND. The images and sounds constantly stopped loading, this period was known as the "dark ages."
I took the site down in late 2004 as I had no way to host it, it was fun but I couldn't afford it. In April of 2005, by which I had more or less given up on YTMND, the owners of Reflected.net approached me about it. They told me they missed YTMND and were willing to host it until I could get back up on my feet. The rest is history. The site now makes enough of an income to pay for the massive amount of traffic it receives and pays for most of its new servers through site sponsorship and donations.
Ok, so what's YTMND?
YTMND is a site created for the purpose of furthering the creativity of its users. It stems from an idea that, using sound, and image, and some text, the users can convey a point, funny, political, or otherwise, to the general media.
