History
From TLKFAAwiki
April 14, 2005
Way back in the day, when the site (which used to be at http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~btman/lionking.html, if you can believe people remembering URLs like that) only had a few screenshots to show off, there was only one Image Archive page. In just a few weeks, enough people had sent me enough additional images that I had to split it up into various sections: Act 1 through 3, Clip Art, and Miscellaneous. At the same time, I created a section for Fan-Art, to house the pictures that some friends and site visitors had created, all on a single HTML page. Some of the first artists were Matt Robinson, Damien Coquelle, Margaret Petrie, Tom Rodriguez, Jayson Gleneck, and a few others who did one picture each and never showed their faces again.
More and more people started sending me pictures, and I added them all into the page manually-- copying the lines of table HTML and inserting the new filenames, and making the thumbnails by hand. Sometimes I even had to make up my own titles and descriptions, as the artists didn't volunteer any, since they were just e-mailing the pictures to me and saying, "Please post this!" Finally I put up an uploading form, with one of the first and most rudimentary Perl scripts I wrote. Finally people could choose an image file on their own machines, type in a title/description, and upload it into a holding area on the server, where it would automatically generate a thumbnail and I could go and deal with it at my leisure.
This was in 1997 or so, after I'd moved lionking.org onto its own dedicated server and domain name, so I was able to run amok on the machine with my various scripts. The image inserter that I wrote at the same time as the uploader/thumbnailer had to pull apart the bare HTML of the appropriate Fan-Art page (after there were about 100 artists, I had to split it into three sections: A-G, H-M, and N-Z, if I recall, and each page just had a few images by a given artist, then the next artist would have his own heading/section, etc), generate its own table row HTML, insert it, and write out the HTML page again. It was pretty ugly, especially since for a time it seemed the only new artists who signed up had names beginning with T, so the third section grew inordinately fast.
Finally I got sick of this situation and redesigned the system so that each artist had his/her own directory on the server, and the artists were all listed on an index page, instead of all being grouped onto a single page with a few images for each artist under individual headings. Every artist directory had a flat text-file database listing all his/her images, and each artist's gallery page was now automatically generated from that, just like the regular Image Archive pages-- even if the artist only had one or two pictures. Finally all the pages looked the same and were guaranteed not to develop typos or anything through normal administration; all I had to do was telnet in and run a command, and an uploaded picture would be neatly filed away under the appropriate artist.
But this was slow to browse, and still unwieldy, and eventually there were several hundred artists, and I had to think about breaking up the artist listing into individual letters. (The standards of the site had changed by this stage, such that most of the fan-art from the original contributors wouldn't qualify anymore because it was mostly copied from screenshots.) At this point-- mid-2000-- I realized that there was no way to add any more features (such as user ratings, which I'd toyed with, and which required text files in the artist directories to keep track of the data) and artist profiles (likewise) while still using the flat text-file database format. So I installed MySQL and started learning how to interface with it. I designed a new standalone website with its own subdomain (fanart.lionking.org), put the alphabetical listings as links on the front, and set about designing a full-fledged artist login and account management system. I migrated all the existing artists and pictures over, and immediately realized that there was a whole lot more I could do with the system now that it was on a real database: everything from Favorite Artist listings to random pictures selected from among hundreds of thousands, or customized page banners, or cookie-based preference tracking with saved popup window sizes, or "art trades", or fulltext searches, or character registration, or user comments, or automated "popularity" tracking, was all possible now. All I had to do was figure out the right joins and selects to make in the SQL queries, and the data came back just the way I wanted.
The new site opened in October 2000, and it's only grown faster since then-- you know the history yourself. It's been a long process of adding more features, streamlining the code, tweaking the user experience, observing how the artists use the site and adjusting the design to better meet their needs and expectations. It's all been a hobby for me, as much as lionking.org ever has, but the fascination for me comes from analyzing the dynamics of this kind of group and managing the infrastructure on the fly so everyone remains happy and engaged. People don't seem to be getting bored with the site, which is a great boon-- there's as much enthusiasm for Lion King fan-art as there ever has been, which makes my job a lot easier. But there's also very little outright dissatisfaction-- people enjoy using the site as-is, and so whenever I notice a shortcoming, it really stands out and I'm able to address it quickly. With the kind of community atmosphere and cooperation that's grown up among the artists, there's been no need to be especially heavy-handed or intrusive in my administration, so the artists themselves have developed their own community standards, doing things like promoting on-topic art and being alert for art theft and so on. It eliminates the need for a lot of unpleasant things you find on a lot of other art sites, like automated art-theft reporting on every page, because I can trust the artists here to put the good of the community and the Archive high on their own priority lists, voluntarily. It's really been exhilarating to watch.
There was a lull in development through 2004 and 2005, because the site and community had reached a sort of a state of equilibrium—all the really important features were in place and working well, and any additional ideas for the site were really major things that would entail a significant widening in the scope of the site and what it aims to do. I did a major code rewrite during that time, weeding out all the really old and ugly Perl code dating back to 1997, and turning common pieces of code into true modules and functions that could be called from anywhere, making maintenance far easier; but that was invisible to users, and as far as most people were concerned there was nothing really happening to the site. Yet the community continued to grow, and I knew that those major new features would have to come soon. So in early 2006 I sat down and learned CSS, and then rewrote the fanart.lionking.org site design using layers and CSS styles to their fullest extent, modeled to a certain degree upon some of the other successful art archives on the Internet. The redesign was a pretty big deal visually, and once everyone got used to it (which took several weeks), it was clear that the site had really made a leap in its aspirations and could honestly claim to be playing with the big boys. With the thousands of artists and hundreds of thousands of pictures in the database at this point, there was more art here at this one movie fan site than there was in some art sites geared toward furry art or anime in general—certainly something to be proud of. But it meant that those ambitious new features were now all the more required. Summer 2006 brought the addition of Sketcher, donated by Thor Harald Johansen of ArtGrounds.com; and a short time afterwards the TLKFAAwiki was added as a resource for cataloging tutorials and other documentation. The site has features that a lot of the larger art galleries are missing, and it's continuing to handle the ever-increasing load quite cheerfully. As much as the site has been a growth experience for the artists in developing their skills, it it's been a growth experience for me as a software engineer. Everything I've done at fanart.lionking.org I've been able to put into practice during my day job, and vice versa. I don't know many software guys who have had this kind of experience to draw on.
Brian Tiemann 16:47, 30 July 2006 PDT
