About This Site

Springfield Weekly has been around for quite some time, in many different forms. Our first incarnation came in Febuary 2001, when I, Eric Messinger, opened "Springfield Weekly", hosted by Tripod. It was a dinky little site, that only had reviews, and had one of those pre-made designs. I didn't know HTML, I didn't know what I was doing, and I paid for my ignorance. It was very bad, to put it bluntly. Then, after three weeks, it was unexpectedly shut down by Tripod, probably because of its copyrighted material.

After three months of absence, I opened "Springfield Weekly", version 2, at Geocities, on May 14th, 2001. The site rapidly grew in content, and got some compliments for its originality, but it had no design, and I still didn't know HTML. Around this time Ben Bromfield joined the staff, and I had more fun doing updates, but I could tell we needed a change. With the help of Ryan Beland, and the assistance of Eric Wirtaten, I learned HTML and JavaScript, and made a new design. Ryan got a little too controlling of the site, so we booted him off, and we launched our new design on October 2, 2001. It was bright yellow, and it got absolutely horrible reviews, and the site floundered once again. So finally, I got the good luck I so greatly needed. Simon Palmer, a great designer, had made an image of a design for another site, and sent it to me to convert into the S.W. design. There were a ton of problems with converting it to a usable form, but after two weeks of non-stop work, I fixed everything, and I re-opened SW on November 11th, 2001, with a new design.

After a boom of around 2 months, I got fed up with the new design. I enlisted the help of Sol, who I met through my running of the Insert Caption Here caption contest, and got him to do a fantastic new design, and I added him to our staff, bringing real HTML experience, and a ton of sounds to the site.

Well, some time passed, and SW enjoyed a huge boom in popularity after being ranked 20th on the Simpsons Channel and 24th on the Simpsons Top 100. However, I got tired of updating with tedious HTML, and Sol thought a design change was needed, so with the help of John Cruz from TSF, Sol made a nice new design in PHP.

After about 8 months that saw an aborted merger, a faked C&D, the coming and departure of Kyle Dowling, and a rise in the ranks at the top 100, I felt it was time for a change in the design. So I enlisted Jason Levy to help out my tired self, spent a week on a new design, and finally got it up , at which point pretty much everyone hated it. And they were right too. Anyways, I let that ugly design stay up for about a month and a half, and then I finally finished up a Flash-utilizing design that people seemed to like. Best design I had done, but still nothing great although it worked.

Around June 2003, SW moved to Eipah Web Hosting, which turned into a disaster with downtime, lost files, and the like. So although I got a huge amount of subsidaries and unlimited space, I knew I had to move. So I headed on over to Uzipp Webhosting, which I'm incredibly happy with, and during the downtime between moves I made a nice improvement on that same Flash-utilizing design, keeping the navbar but making almost everything blue and snazzier. This design was up for around four months, and the site made some gains in popularity during that time.

After about four months, I decided once again to re-design, but this time also re-vamp old content and add lots of new content and features. I took inspiration from the old Evergreen Terrace site and Sol's old design, made a design that was a lot more professional than anything I had done before. The Flash navigation was ditched in favor of a left sidebar. I also added, for the first time in this site's history, right-side areas - places for sound clips, random links, episode descriptions, and the like, which I felt added a lot to the interactivity of the site. And that's the design you see right now. I was really happy with how it turned out. Around that point in time, Springfield Weekly hit #7 in Simpsons Top 100 for general sites, and the site was at its peak. Little did I know, at that point, that it would be almost a year and a half later before I would re-design again.

The site at that point was doing tremendously well. It rode into the summer season with steady updates, as Jason began to take on more and more of a role in the updating. Through July and August, the site maintained something in the area of 250-300 hits a day, and was generally doing fine. Then, in mid-August, UZIPP's server, which the site was hosted on, died. The end result was alternately terrifying, ridiculous, and hilarious. There was around a two-week downtime. When the site was finally back up, it had lost a month of content. I frantically re-added what I could, only to find within a few days that the site had re-set itself back to early August again, clearing my attempts at re-constructing the lost content. As well, for a time, the site was accidently replaced against my will by a "Star Wars" fan site, dedicated to the moon of Endor. Needless to say, it was not a happy time. Things finally stabilized around September, at which point I decided that I wanted to whip up a quick new design to win back the 100-150 hits per day that we had lost after coming out of our weeks of downtime and turmoil. It would take me almost two-thirds of a year to complete that process.

At first, I fooled around with concepts for a simple riff on a lot of the site's recurring themes, in terms of design (note: a lot of the designs and design concepts mentioned in this paragraph can be seen on the left sidebar.) As I was doing so, I became heavily influenced by my friend Todd Zusman, who I knew in real life. For about a four-month period, we got into continual arguments about my site, its coding, its design, and the like. Nothing could offer the kind of "clean", "new" feeling that I really wanted and that Todd thought I needed. The design gradually took shape, however, as I ground through rough patches and the lack of time afforded to me by the demands of my junior year in high school. At the start of 2005, the design reached roughly its present form. What was neccessitated by the new design, however, was a completely revamped set-up for every page on the site. Each page needed re-coding, its own image, a sidebar, etc... an incredibly daunting task. Over a period of several months, I worked intermittently to try and get the site to the point where it was ready for the re-design. During that time, I solely churned out reviews, as Jason took over most of the content production. Finally, I was ready to set a launch date of April 1st, which I of course missed. Within a week or two, however, the site came out in its final form. Reaction was mostly positive, with many noticing the individual improvements to each page.

The fresh, better-coded design lasted for about four to six months before I shook things up again. Rather impulsively, I decided that the design was simply too bland. I quickly whipped up the basics of the current design in about a day, and spent the next few weeks tweaking the design for different browsers and for strict coding. The decision was made also to ditch the sidebar entirely and rework the content area, allowing for a simpler presentation. Simultaneously, I made sure every page on the site was recoded, resulting in one of the few major non-blog sites on the Internet to be up to this level of web standardization in its construction. The end result earned some of the best accolades I had ever received for the site's visual presentation, and from then on Springfield Weekly has been experiencing a bit of a revival. Hits are consistently higher than they have been for most of the site's history, and in the dwindling community at present the site is one of the few majors to still be actively updating and improving itself. It's been a great ride so far, and I have no reason to think that the site won't be continuing for, at the least, the rest of the show's run of new episodes on television. For beyond that, only time will tell.

Now, for the thank-yous:

Thanks to Todd Zusman for the current version of the site; he doesn't care that I'm appreciative and he probably still hates this site, but it's a lot better because of him.

Thanks to Sol for the two designs he did for this site, as he is greatly responsible for this site's current level of recognition within the community.

Thanks to Alex Khusid for random assistance with endless technical problems and design tweaks

Thanks to Bowman, Tim, Levin, Scott Vivian, John Cruz, and all the other webmaster nuts who are always good for laughs or help.

And, finally, thanks to Eric Wirtaten, Adam Wolfe, JoeB, Conor, and Mike from ES for helping me with this site at various times.

Springfield Weekly VERSION 11

Springfield Weekly VERSION 10

Springfield Weekly VERSION 9

Springfield Weekly VERSION 8

Springfield Weekly VERSION 6

Name:Eric

Age: 17

E-Mail: eric@duffgardens.net

Bio: Eric has been running Springfield Weekly since it began. He plays alto sax, annoys many of his friends, and has a really killer backhand at ping-pong.
Position: Eric is the creator, designer, coder, payer of hosting fees, etc..., in addition to creating a strong majority of the content you see in the sections.

Quote: "If elected mayor, my first act will be to kill the whole lot of yeh, and burn yer town to cinders!"

Name: Jason

Age: 17

E-mail: jlevy4ever@hotmail.com

Bio: Jason is a sports fanatic who, like most of you, knows the best show on television is The Simpsons.  With a good knowledge of the show, he's a huge fan, and isn't afraid to speak his mind when it comes to the four fingered family.  When he's not watching the Simpsons, he can be seen playing hockey, basketball or simply cheering on the Toronto Maple Leafs.  His instrument of choice is the trumpet and if he's not pulling in the top marks, he's giving the teachers a tough time.

Position: Jason helps out with the content and updates to make Springfield Weekly as good as it can get.

Quote: "Remember the time your dog ate my goldfish, and then you said I didn't have any goldfish?  But why did I have the bowl Bart?  Why did I have the bowl?"