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About Us Here are some interesting facts about my site, how, and why it was created. - Origin Of "The Springfield Files" I got the idea to start a Simpsons website back in the Summer of 2004. I got some inspiration from some of the other Simpsons sites on the net and set to work on the design, despite the warnings of receiving "Cease And Desist Orders" from Fox - History As I said above, the site got it's start in the summer of 2004. I used Microsoft FrontPage to build and design the site, Adobe Photoshop for logos and other images, and Macromedia Flash MX for making grabpics. Around the end of August, the site was almost finished, the design could've been better, but it was still a practically finished web page. Until, that is, I attempted to re-design the navigation on the pages, the first step being, deleting the pages from the current navigation, of course I then hit the wrong button, therefore permanently deleting every page and piece of content I had made. That set me back quite a bit, but still didn't kill my spirit. I re-worked the design, making the background a soothing blue rather than glaring yellow, and I moved the navigation from the top to the side, allowing more space for me to add more pages later on. So, after another 3 and a half months, the site was close enough to being finished that I could finally put it online. At first, I was intending to use the free web space provided with my Verizon account, but as soon as the site was online, it was clear I'd have to find something better. I had lost files, missing links, files that would only sometimes appear, etc. So after about a week of searching, I eventually settled for Fortune City Web Hosting, which I've been very happy with so far. Therefore, on December 27, 2004, "The Springfield Files" officially opened it's doors. Sometime during July of 2005, I decided, after re-reading a lot of comments made about the site, to re-design. I tried a few concepts, but when it came down to it, I'm just not the greatest web designer in the world. So I made a thread at the NHC to see if anyone would be willing to donate a design. John from Simpsons Central volunteered, and so in about a month and a half, John (with some help from Lee of The Springfield Connection) had a great new design sent to me. To this day, it's probably the most professional looking design I've ever had. By June of 2006 I'd been using John and Lee's design for almost a year. I decided it was time for a change and experimented with one of my own designs. I had actually made the design quite a while ago and never used it, but I thought it was probably the best designing work I'd done for TSF. I tweaked the old design a little and it was ready to go. Having experimented with PHP on my other (and much smaller) site Digital Springfield, I decided I should do the same for TSF and get everything coded the right way. Now that the whole site was coded in PHP, it would be a lot easier for me to implement a new design later on. It opened to fairly good reviews from the rest of the Simpsons web community. Fast forward to September 2006. At this point I was running three separate sites loosely related to the same thing, this one, Digital Springfield, and The Springfield Network. DS was a tutorial site, and TSN was a webnews and opinion based site. With all the other stuff I had going on, I didn't really have time to update all three, so I decided to merge them all into The Springfield Files and create one 'supersite'. I still fully intend to update all the TSN and DS sections, along with including webnews in my regular updates here. Some info and designs for both sites can be found below. March 15, 2007 was the launch date for TSF 4.0. It's been by far the most rushed design that I've ever done for this site. The entire thing was created, coded and ready to go within three days. I was in a bit of an updating slump at the time, and I wanted a way to breathe some new life into the site. Personally I think version 4 is the best design I've ever made, but some of my fellow webmasters were a little less than enthusiastic about it. Either way, it's here for time being. I briefly considered changing this design to a brighter (and greener) one for the summer, but I decided it wouldn't really be worth it. -My Other Sites Digital Springfield: This was a project I began working on in December of 2005. The site launched officially December 30. Essentially, it was a collection of webmaster tutorials written by various people intended for use by the newer webmasters in the Simpsons community. Through a partnership with the Krustylu Studios forum, many people contributed tutorials on different subjects, ranging from graphics to HTML/PHP coding. The first design was made by Matthew. Around May of 2006 the site had fallen into a state of disrepair, which was when I recruited Brad to make a new design. It turned out excellent, and the site was re-launched not long after. Unfortunately it began to fall apart again towards the end of the summer, and eventually, the decision was made to merge it with this site instead of keeping it separate. Many people contributed to the site, but the person who ended up helping me the most was Brad. Not only was DS hosted at his site Krustylu Studios, but he also helped me in setting up (and fixing problems with) the site's Cutenews, and made its second (and best) design. The Springfield Network: During the summer of 2006, I took on a small project that was originally planned to be a simple webnews site. Through suggestions at the NHC forum, the concept was later expanded into a "site dedicated to everyone else's sites". I updated frequently with webnews, but I also reviewed other Simpsons sites and wrote some short rants/editorials and other random web based content. I made the first and only design, and I think it's still my best design work to date. The site was fairly successful on its own, but when DS and TSF merged, it only made sense for TSN to go along with them. Hosting was again provided by Krustylu Studios when the site was active. - Webmaster Profile Name: grissom (Well actually my online alias, not giving out my real name for security reasons) Bio: I've been a hardcore Simpsons fan for a while now. I spend a lot of my time playing various types of video games, working on this site, listening to music, and watching "The Simpsons". I'm also really interested in film, I play the guitar, and I enjoy collecting DVDs and records Favorite Episodes: The Cartridge Family, Cape Fear, Poppa's Got A Brand New Badge, The Springfield Files Favorite Characters: Mr. Burns, Homer, Comic Book Guy Favorite Shows: The Simpsons, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Lost, Arrested Development, Futurama, The Office, 24, Prison Break, The Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks, The X-Files Favorite Movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, The Godfather, The Departed, Children of Men, Back to the Future, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas, The Life Aquatic, Vertigo, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Kill Bill, There Will Be Blood, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Evil Dead series Favorite Bands/Musicians: The Beatles, Ben Folds, Franz Ferdinand, Pink Floyd, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Spoon, Radiohead, Silver Jews, Wilco, Beulah, Elvis Costello, Destroyer, Pavement, The Decemberists, David Bowie, Bob Dylan My nerdy online archive of my DVD collection - Old Designs This design is currently our fourth to make it online, below you can view all of the prototype designs I made, and TSF's original three designs. And before I had any design experience at all, I came up a design so incredibly awful that it actually pains me to look at it now. It was bright, glaring yellow and had a horribly designed navigation. All the graphics were done in MS Paint, making the site look about as amateurish as humanly possible. Below you can find an attempted recreation of it. I managed to salvage the images, but I'm still not entirely sure this is what it looked like. The pages I made with this design were deleted a long time ago. And no, I do not know why the navigation was in two different fonts. |
- Editorials: 18
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