Wizarding World - About Us (the Saga)

THE SAGA OF WIZARDING WORLD

SOMEONE'S COOL IDEA

One of us (neither of us will admit to it now) got this really "excellent" idea to do this site in August, 2000, after reading the 4th HP book. Wow! What an inspiration that book was! We thought the first 3 books were incredible, but when we realized at the end of "Goblet of Fire" that we were in the middle of not only great, fun literature, but an epic mystery and adventure, we knew we had to correlate everything. Bringing all the Harry Potter sites together in one reference place, by category, seemed to be the best idea - as we could all share our observations or just have fun.

We had already written magazine articles on Harry Potter, so we knew we could easily generate the content. We had also put up HTML websites, but we do not know Java, and we wanted some mouse-overs and fun things that are fairly simple in Java, plus we needed a graphics artist.

We talked to a friend, who just happened to know both JavaScript and graphics, to partner with us for some basic icons, the background, the mouse-overs and some cool stuff. This was going to be a no-brainer - a fun site - and no problem recruiting help. We decided we would get it up in time for Halloween of that year.

But we had Murphy messing with us...

IF IT CAN GO WRONG...

We registered with a site hosting provider who could not seem to get our domain name resolved - taking waaaay too much time for just a simple request. We learned to place customer service calls at 2:00am so the wait was only an hour…. We now have a different ISP. (rescued by Winstar).

In the meantime, our graphics/programmer got busy and opted for pay, so we paid him to start the work, but we could not continue to afford him. We could not seem to understand why he preferred money to fun, but we all have our priorities... So who needs Java anyway??

We needed help with putting together character lists, trivia, and keeping up with all the sites, therefore, every time anyone said they had read and liked Harry Potter, we'd say "wanna help put together a really cool (hint, hint) web site about Harry Potter?" That was where we lost their attention :( There were a few who promised to help, but we're still waiting for them to let us know when they're ready... [sigh].

So... Halloween 2000 came and went, and Wizarding World was still a phantom site.

One Down.

ANOTHER (GREAT?) IDEA

At the beginning of 2001, we had proposed to write about the mythological backgrounds of J. K. Rowling's references for a magazine article. When they ran out of enough room to include it, we were considering turning it into a book - as we had all these excellent notes and references we had pulled together. Too bad they didn't have us do the article, but it's good we never got around to doing the book, or we would still be writing it while David Colbert relaxes as (Magical Worlds of Harry Potter) hits the shelves. Not even worth using those notes - Ellie Rosenthal has gone far beyond the book - we will just link to "What's In a Name" that the Lexicon recommends.

Two Down.

THIRD TIME'S A CHARM, RIGHT?

In the meantime, we had found another artist who was in our price range (cheap) who said he would originate the art, but he did not have graphics software for his personal machine, and we couldn't figure out how to get him access to any. (We should have known if we could afford him, it wouldn't work).

Dumbledore must feel like this when another year comes along and he has again lost his Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher...

Eventually we somehow stumbled onto a gift of a programmer (you will have to torture us, or use Veritaserum, if you want her name), who likes money but understands poverty. At least it would now be technically feasible to do what we thought was necessary to create the site we wanted.

We kept writing the content, but since we still did not have graphics, we cracked open our copy of MS Paint (Win 95) and started doing some of it ourselves in bitmap (please don't laugh). Got the background, header, and some more icons done that way.

By this time, our content had become really interesting, and we figured if nothing else, we could present some unique ideas and some background that was not found anywhere else. We had been working on time-lines, maps, glossaries, plot synopses, and all the clues. As the Harry Potter thing had gotten a bit slow for everyone (Amazon closed down their Potter-specific discussion board), we had not surfed the Harry Potter fan sites in a long time - mainly due to time, but also to try not to be too influenced by the other sites. That was to turn out to be a mistake...

Found an artist who had all the software (we asked), tons of experience (we didn't ask), and even read and liked Harry Potter so much that he agreed to do the partner thing (too much to ask)! Everything was great... for about a week. He suddenly got a new project. Another one of those weird people who seems to think money is important - maybe we are on the wrong track here...

FOR THOSE OF YOU KEEPING SCORE:

Money - 3
Wizarding World - 0

Only 9 months late, now... Next goal - up by Harry Potter's birthday.

Finally found yet another artist - he is well-known, busy, likes money, but is moved by tears (our type). He was kind enough to fix up all the loose-ends - so thanks to him, we have all our icons. Trouble is, we still needed our map fixed, and he did not have time to do that. We also had long abandoned updating the site links.

Everything was looking pretty good, but we were way behind. We had the synopses and the glossaries most of the way finished (the 2 worst sections), some fun stuff completely finished, but then we were still working on real-world and wizarding-world timelines, genealogy, maps, white papers, subtle clues, and trivia. It was clear that without a Time-Turner, it was unlikely we could get everything done. We just figured most of it would be unique enough that we could go with what we had and then continue to update. We now had some content, but it would have been depressing to us to put it up without the functions we had been developing for over almost a year. It was embarrassing enough to look at the poor half-completed site. Happily, no one seemed to have noticed we existed, and we intentionally had not submitted ourselves to any search engines. In the meantime, we began to update our external links

Only 2 weeks now before Harry's birthday, 2001.

By this time, we would have welcomed help from Snape :{

Many of the old links and sites were stale, under construction, or just gone. Then came the shock...

We discovered that the Harry Potter Lexicon had truly lived up to its name, and that most of our "totally unique" ideas were already done - and [groan] done well!! Pit in stomach. All that work, and now what?? Time to re-evaluate...

It was stupid to continue any more work on our timeline - and it looked like Lexicon was more comprehensive anyway - we'll just link to Lexicon. Steve Vander Ark's character profiles were complete, so why bother finishing those either. We had a map of Hogwarts grounds, but it was different than his, so we decided to keep that one - good stuff for debating the subject. We had yet to start a map of Diagon Alley, and were not about to start when we saw his gem - another link to Lexicon. He had tons more - British stuff is not our forte, plus he had also tackled subjects that were so detailed and that we couldn't even imagine doing.

Three Down.

TO BE, OR NOT TO BE...

...But we refused to be out of the game after all that grief and hard work.

So what were our strengths? How could we differentiate? How could we do so in less than 2 weeks?? eek!

We were still strong in links, quotes, synopses, and our analyses - including predictions. Looked like we still had enough to give us the niche we needed, so we ditched the duplicate work and focused on our core - but we now had to generate more content within our core. There was now no way we could be completely finished by Harry's birthday, but we had to put up what we could, or we might just give up.

Some good news - Another kind artist fixed our home page map just before he left for vacation, but he did not have time to add the icons... We cried a lot... the nice artist who had done the icons laid them out on the map for us.

Some bad news - Our programmer was now on vacation (vacations seem to be popular - we should consider trying one). So, instead of having our programmer map the icon links with her point-and-click software, we manually edited each icon coordinate-by-coordinate - brain-numbing but effective.

"SMASH!... a very happy birthday to yeh."

So we are celebrating Harry Potter's birthday by putting everything up on the site on July 31, even though it is not totally ready. Please remember that this is a non-finished site. We hope you enjoy what you find here. If this site is successful, we will continue to enhance it and make it more useful for everyone. If it's not, we will just add it to our Pensieve for future reference...

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