History

This website has a somewhat unorthodox domain name. It has, of course, a story behind it.

The Writing Pot was a joint project launched by Daniel Ma and me back in 2003. The idea was to create a "writing" site, where young authors all over the world could post the works to be read and reviewed. I got enlisted by Dan Ma to manage the technical aspect of the site, having wanted to strike back at fictionpress.com for a harsh and forbidding scene where reviews were far and in-between.

Mind you, back then, we were Middle Schoolers. The last little project we had embarked upon, involving the League of the Black Lotus and other clans, was struck down by the school system as gang-like behavior (we had already taken to partitioning up the school grounds into territories).

So, without the slightest inkling of what we were getting ourselves into, we set off to create this website. Back then, to me, HTML was pretty cool, and updating the site by putting text files in frames and manually updating a static website low maintenance. We'd have all sorts of stuff on the site: bad poetry, good poetry, strange fiction, better fiction, stitched-together multi-author fiction, etc. These were the "good ol' days." JAMS Writers, we were called.

Expansion happened. Nearing the end of 8th grade, we realized we could possibly keep our website named JAMS Writers, since JAMS would no longer be our school. We got a new name: The Writing Pot, and moved off to new, spiffier hosting by zer0host (now defunct) from our puny Tripod website.

I began to dabble in PHP. It had always irked me how the text on our website was plain, txt files. Visitors would ask, "How come the stories look funny?" Thus, the genesis of s.php. It started off with the simple task of making sure users could change the font and text-size of anything it displayed (obviously I had never heard of browser stylesheets). I learned the joys of sessions, \r\n, and ereg_replace that fateful summer. Zer0host also disappeared mysteriously, leaving us to finally register our own domain name: thewritingpot.com.

Things escalated from there. I began adding loads of features to the website, and soon it occurred to me that I should PHP-ize the whole site! Programming was underway to turn the website into something more modern and professional. I had gotten my feet wet in programming, and was determined to dive deeper.

But while oodles and oodles of (poorly) written code was being churned out, something happened: we entered High School. Free time became a lot more restricted, although we'd always find time to chillax in a forum, which, while requiring the least work to create, was by far the most popular section of the site. Submissions dwindled, and reviews nearly vanished.

A phenomenon, all too common within Internet communities, began to manifest. It was discontent. It was revolution. It was call for reform. Concerned with what he saw as the "oncoming tide of corruption" Dan Ma sought to shift the emphasis from the forums back to the writing.

To make a long story short, we had a nasty little flamewar. Pages of forum topics were filled with members vigorously debating the true spirit of The Writing Pot, methods we could take to encourage reviews, other possibilities for expanding the website. There were so many people that were involved in the dialogues, and so many hours spent furiously typing in posts to the forum. At times we'd have a post every minute. Before the forums closed down, we had posted 23375 forum posts, a fair amount considering there were only about 20 people actively participating.

Eventually, we burned out. Multiple calls to action failed to reinvigorate the website. Most of us simply lost interest in The Writing Pot, some of us in the greater field of writing. High School had taken its toll. Even after the crash, I continued refactoring the website's code to make The Writing Pot better; alas, the legacy code was so old and crusty that I eventually gave up.

Even though the website was dead, it still lived on in the Internet, an empty shell of what it once was. Every story, including the ones published way back in 2003, used to be up here. December 6, 2006, I decided to mercifully retire the website. You can still peruse snapshots of the site at the Internet Archive, but The Writing Pot's chapter has closed.