If things have been quiet around here lately, it’s because all my free time has gone to the Gettingit.com redesign. This is the perfect exercise in pointlessness: redesigning a defunct, three-year-old webzine that hasn’t published an article since 2000.
Well, not entirely pointless. Webpower, the company that funded Gettingit, finally killed the old story database a couple weeks ago, leaving the entire archive offline. I’d foreseen that inevitability a while back, and whipped up a Perl script to crawl the old site and save the stories locally. I’m glad I did.
Take a look and let me know what you think. Built in a couple weeks with no budget and PHP/MySQL/Apache by my side, I’m proud of it. I did everything except for the monkey logos, which were provided by the extremely talented Goopy.
The front page is regenerated every couple minutes, so reload occasionally for all new (old) content.
Thanks so much for saving GettingIt. All of us, the editors the writers, everyone involved, owe you a huge debt.
This is important.
This is important! This means something!
Awesome job from a programming standpoint. You ought to sell this system, I think there is a big need for it for a lot of defunct sites that might still have a chance to be revitalized.
I’m impressed and entertained. Nobody’s mentioning how very nice the interface is to use. Very good work.
[this is good]
Yeah! I’ve kept GettingIt in my bookmarks for years as I never understood why it wouldn’t die! Thanks for keeping it alive.
Boy, I’m a retard. Way back when, a couple of my friends told me RU Sirius was heading this great new website, and that he paid his freelancers. I was happy about the first part and skeptical of the second. Then I checked it out, and it was great. I regret not having written for it. Thanks for keeping it alive!
i’ve missed GI so much….glad to wallow in nostalgia. Don’t spose there’s much chance of a rebirth ever? If so please count me among your loyal bitches, thanks x
Lots of nice kudos re: my article on Women Who Stand Up To Pee.
Would have been even nicer if you guys had paid me as promised.
Bob Rubel
Really? They were really good about paying people, and usually with lots of money compared to other publications (on or off) at the time. As far as I knew, Al only stiffed writers when the site folded.
Where’s the Crumb interview??? Can’t find it in the article list and doesn’t come up in the search!
Thanks for the (recent) memories!
Also, where’s the “rage against my ass” article about Rage against the machine?
Wow. I’m a freelance writer myself and happened across GettingIt by accident. I was actually Googling for prey animals on the Veldt and couldn’t resist checking out the “Hunting Whores on the Veldt” story (“What?!?”). Scandalous material, wonderfully written. Blew far too much time crawling the site and reading archived stories, including the rise and fall of GI. My regrets — you had something truly outstanding there. Here’s hoping for a future resurrection. Oh, and the site interface works and looks just fine. Good work.
I loved GettingIt. It should be restarted, since nothing else has been as entertaining or educational… of course, I also loved Mondo2000!
As on of the former freelance illustrators for GettingIt, I’m a little sad to see *only* copy and no spot art. But, as someone else had posted, we (along with the writers) were actually paid and paid well! Bless everyone involved. Thanks for the archive!
On second look, it seems that for old time’s sake you could have used a little bit of the “green” at least as an accent color…Viva la verde!
really cool interface and wonderfully simple but elegant design! Peace
Jimmy: Is ten years too late to reply to a blog comment? The Crumb interview is here. Not sure about the Rage article, though…