Gadgetopia is a blog devoted to all things geek. We’ve tried a couple times to narrow the content down to one or two subjects, but it just hasn’t worked. We pretty much talk about anything and everything that strikes our fancy.
Like most blogs, we post about a lot of things we find on other sites. We post a fair amount of original content as well, usually on programming, development, and other deep geek endeavours.
As of this moment, Gadgetopia consists of seven authors: Deane, Joe, Dave, Dave, Rob, Ryan, and Noel.
In November 2005, Gadgetopia became the property of Blend Interactive. Joe and Deane are partners in this firm.
Back in 1999, the four partners of a fledging Web design firm came up with an idea for a Web site about PDAs — the hip, new gadget back then (Joe had a Phillips Nino — the rest of them were in awe). They even thought up a name: Gadgetopia.
Sadly, things didn’t work out for the site, and the domain names they purchased kind of sat around.
In 2002, Deane Barker started a Web site called deanebarker.net. It was in the hip, new format: a blog. Over the next few months, Deane talked about everything and nothing in particular.
Then he said something that made a local company angry, he felt guilty about it, and he took the site offline.
About six weeks after that, Deane’s friends demanded he restart the blog because they were sick and tired of Deane emailing them links to things he found on the Internet.
Wanting to distance himself from the site a bit and incorporate some leveler heads, Deane invited a few friends to blog with him and he changed the name of the site to Gadgetopia. It didn’t have much to do with gadgets, but they had the domain name sitting around and it was pretty catchy, so why not?
Since then, the site has has meandered from topic to topic: an average of four per day for three straight years. Somewhere along the way, a guy named Chris came up with tag line “Geek and You Shall Find” (he admitted that he stole it from somewhere, but he didn’t remember where).
Gadgetopia is hosted on servers maintained by Blend Interactive running Gentoo Linux. Gadgetopia is built on Movable Type 3.2, with a dozen or so plugins and numerous PHP hacks.
August 12, 2002
The first post to deanebarker.net
February 20, 2003
The site moves off of a custom-built, PHP-based system to Movable Type. The site has remained on Movable Type every since.
Early April, 2003
deanebarker.net goes offline because Deane said something stupid about a company and got threatened by their lawyer. He probably didn’t have to stop blogging, but he felt like a complete tool about the whole thing.
May 26, 2003
deanebarker.net returns with this post about searching multiple XML documents
June 3, 2003
The announcement of the name change and new authors coming on board.
September 9, 2003
Entry #1,000 is posted about…well, being entry #1000.
October 31, 2003
The site tries something new called “Google AdSense.”
January 29, 2004
Entry #2,000 is posted about the guy who invented the Ctrl-Alt-Delete sequence.
April 26, 2004
Deane announces the birth of his third child on the blog.
September 24, 2004
Entry #3,000 is posted about different models of RSS Aggregation.
February 27, 2005
Best single day for Google AdSense: $75.64.
June 17, 2005
Entry #4,000 goes online as a retrospective about the last 4,000 posts.
October 11, 2005
Gadgetopia joins the FM Publishing network.
December 1, 2005
Gadgetopia joins the 9 Rules network.
February 22, 2006
Post #5,000
February 23, 2006
Gadgetopia gets summarily kicked out of the 9 Rules network.
