Today is http://www.rickspringfield.net/ 11th birthday. The above graphic is one of the first graphics to ever get housed on the site, and the original title was "Still Crazy For Rick".
My girlfriend Dawn and I started the site as a fan club website for the RLS fan club. We'd met Vivian Acinelli at a fan club gathering in Springfield, OH (appropriate) earlier that summer, and mentioned that we were interested in doing a site, and did she have one yet? Us feeling like we knew our way around the fledgling internet having been "online" for all of a year and a half.
Viv was interested in us working on the site, and our initial site cost $30 a month and didn't even have the name Rick Springfield in the web address. There was no such thing as free or even cheap hosting back in those days. Dawn and I split the cost every month.
Our initial site had just a few different areas to it. Dawn had a scanner, so the way we put photos on the website was to scan our old magazines and tour programs. This was before Google, before Amazon, before there were sites out there you could use templates from, or even photos from. I remember we were heavy on the tour photos from the '84 program, that had been my favorite.
A year later, Dawn bowed out of the site because her life got much busier, and I took it over. That was the year Sahara Snow came out, and it was also the first year Rick hosted the Tucson charity event. The site got much busier. There were even rumors about an official website coming about, but no movement happened on that for a while.
In 1998, I moved the site over to a tripd site, which was free (exciting after having paid for the site every month). The skeleton of the site still sits online today: http://members.tripod.com/~amy1970. I remember citing this very long address off to a reporter in Tucson that year. I'm still surprised people even found the site, but they did. That was the summer that Rick started touring again after so long, and with rumors that a new album was in the works, the fans got really excited.
In 1999, an official website was launched, http://www.rickspringfield.com/. By then our site had been online 3 years, and a few other sites devoted to Rick were starting to pop up around the internet. Mailing lists were driving fan communication by then and it was a heady time for RS fans. Lots and lots of fans were discovering Rick again through his tour. Later that year, I was asked to start working on http://www.rickspringfield.com/, and that was an honor that to this day I still can't believe.
In 2000, I moved our site to its current home, http://www.rickspringfield.net/. If you click this link: http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.rickspringfield.net you can see the various incarnations it has taken over the last seven years at this address. Because I never delete things, a lot of these old files are still online and therefore visible. It's kind of crazy to look at all of this now, isn't it?
In late 2004, Vivian announced she would be closing the RLS fan club. The club had served fans through the very long dry years of the late 80s and early 90s, through his TV boon of the mid 90s and through the dawning of the internet age in the late 90s and the year 2000s. The club raised thousands and thousands of dollars for charity and brought fans together at a time when they truly felt perhaps they were the only ones who really "got it" about the talents of Rick Springfield. In 2004, I also relinquished my role on http://www.rickspringfield.com/ to its current webmaster, and it was an odd transition for me to go from being in the forefront of Rick's career path to watching from the sidelines.
That being said, I am still amazed at Rick's career, his longevity, his talent and his chutzpah. And like him, I just can't seem to give up the ghost. http://www.rickspringfield.net/ is still online to this day, mostly serving as a historical archive. Our current news now gets posted on our sister blog, http://www.rickspringfieldandus.blogspot.com/. This is where we keep things fresh and current. But there is something in me that thinks http://www.rickspringfield.net/ still has some value and some purpose, and so eleven years later, it is transitioning to whatever its new role may be.
We have launched a new message board on http://www.rickspringfield.net/ at www.rickspringfield.net/forum to go along with our fresh new chat room installed earlier this year. I'd love it if you dropped by and left a few comments about rs.net and what it has meant to you, if anything, in the last eleven years. I hope you've enjoyed the efforts I've put into http://www.rickspringfield.net/. It has not always been perfect, but I hope that the good has outweighed the bad.
Happy Birthday http://www.rickspringfield.net/. I'll never stop pinching myself for the amazing dreams it helped come true.
Amy
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