As some readers know, I have been working most of my waking hours over the past year here. Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of the initial Beta launch of the social news site, and I contributed to the official Happy Birthday post here. However, official language tends to leave out some of the fun, mostly insider things that have transpired over the last year. So this goes out to my group, past and present, with all thanks due to the Blogsmith team and the letters K-E-T-C-H-U and P. There was the CodeJam in Santa Monica, CA, in March of 2006 which I barely missed. I’ll let Alex tell that story.

There was the NY CodeJam of May-June 2006, where I was initiated into the fraternity of Blogsmith+Netscape. Good times: Lil Bow Wow, ketchup, cigarette runs, and 8 laptops working off one hotel room internet connection. Mysterious file disappearances. Lots of room service burgers and 3-donut breakfasts. Fun was had by all.

Back home after the CodeJam (and detox), we readied ourselves for a June 15 Beta launch. The nights around the Beta launch were pretty long and grueling. There were a lot of jokes that seemed really funny at 3:38am that, on retrospect, weren’t that funny. We managed to prop the site up enough to get it launched.

And then the feedback. Oh, the feedback! Existing Netscape members who loved the site they had saw the new Beta site as an ominous change in the near future that they could not stop.

Around launch day we had a visitor in a chat room we mistakenly just called “bleh”, who turned out to be more than just someone. And oh, more feedback. The biggest story in the first few days was, if I remember correctly, “Netscape’s Blunder”. Special times.

We kept plugging away at it, and some of the new site’s members started to stick. The bond created through agonizing schedules continued to grow, and through it all, friendships were made that will continue on. The site got hacked, Trey was woken up in the middle of the night to stop a XSS exploit which caused a dialog box to appear in the Netscape.com homepage to say naughty things about us. What fun!

In August I took over as the lead engineer as Alex transitioned back to Blogsmith full-time. The ride continued to be wild, Chris Finke created a sweet video player so that we could allow videos to be uploaded onto the site. This allowed Ryan Budke, who was invited to shoot video on the set of a bunch of different TV shows, to have a place to showcase it.

In November 2006 I took Netscape on its first non-Brian Alvey CodeJam. We stayed at the Mosaic Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA (thanks to CK for finding the perfect hotel name!)

2007 brought no shortage of changes within the group. Jason had already announced his departure, and CK announced his in January. I stepped in as Director during that time, and I feel like I’ve been running ever since!

We have built a great team at Netscape, and I have a lot to be thankful for as I look backward. Thanks to:

Jason & Brian, the masterminds
Alex, the first Ninja code leader
CK, the first, last, and only CK
Trey, the brains
Chris Finke, the whiz kid
Craig, the SEO wizard
The Blogsmith crew: Gavin, Celly, Christoph, and Mike
The current Netscape team, you guys are terrific!