April 1, 2010
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The Frabjous History of the Daily News, and all that entails!!! SPECIAL FEATURE: the first online DN ever posted!
Are you excited? You shouldn't be LOLZ!
The Daily News
1 Well, this is the last DN 'til WAY after Easter.2 Yesterday I realized that the DN has been going strong since 1996, when we did Guys and Dolls at YB. As the director, I wasn't quite sure as to how to communicate with the kids in Choir, Band, AND Drama all at the same time.
3 So I invented the Daily News, based on the song Guys and Dolls from the musical of the same name. What's in the Daily News? I'll tellya what's in the Daily News...
4 If you are familiar with the Show, you know what I'm talking about. If you were IN the Show, holla back!
5 So the history: I wrote hard copies of the DN every single day that Spring, posting them in the hallway in the Performing Arts building. I would stack the new one on top of the old one so people could get a sense of continuity. These were the days when people talked with one another. No blogs, Facebooks, texts, tweets, etc. Human contact, and laughs galore!
6 Each morning, kids would flock to the really dumb meanderings of my frabjous mind, and separate the important notifications from my own ridiculous insights into life, love, and the current Show.
7 It became something of a lark, as it is now, only it served a purpose as well. I always remember coming in with the DN, opening the door to the PA building, and smelling strong coffee bubbling on Ponch's brewer. He'd come over and talk like a drug traffiker: "Dude. This sh#t's GOOD." I'd take a sip, and he'd nod like a guy who just gave you a taste of the best bud in Maui. I would then point to the DN and give a look back in kind.
8 I used to LOVE posting it on the wall, and then going in to the office awaiting feedback. I got lots, and it was usually fun stuff, with the students crowding around and asking what I meant by item A, and item B. There were always LOTS of laughs, the first LOLZ!
9 Well, time passed, as is its wont, and after a few years flew by, I attempted making a website, and then posting all my DN's there.
10 It was the eventually useless geocities.com, but really, it was not user friendly.
11 Still, I enjoyed putting it together and keeping up with the times.
12 At the time, I had NO idea that I had invented blogging. Once I went online with the DN, blogs were around, but the DN was essentially a blog without the web in 1996. Perhaps it could be categorized as the world's first un-blog, but it still had the general idea and concept. But it certainly pre-dated blogs, that's fo sho!
13 At that time, there was no such thing as a blog, a Twitter, a Facebook, a Tumblr, nor any other means of sharing info, commenting on life, or using the internet for simple sharing. There were "chat" rooms, but that was chatting, not blogging.
14 Somewhere around 2001, I had decided that in order to keep up with technology, that I needed to create a website.
15 Back then, MAYBE 3% of teachers had anything remotely resembling a website.
16 But geocities was clunky, and I knew that if I could only master HTML, I would have it. I did manage to put together a pretty fun website called ybdrama.com, which still sits in the weeds awaiting further attention to this day.
17 It was in the summer of 2002. I painstakingly fought through the jungled mess that was geocities and built a website that still stands to this day. Although I stopped bothering with it in 2006, it rests as a sloppy museum piece. Links that were once lined up beautifully are now crooked, like an old scrapbook that has things slipping and repositioning. But if you do go there, navigate with the arrows; the homepage link to the DN Archives is no longer active. Just poke a few right arrows, and you can get to a live link to them. Or just return here. Here is the link to the DN Archives:
On July 24, 2002, I launched the first DN online. Here it is, in its entirety:The DailyNews
7/24/021 Yeesh.
2 I just love that word.
3 Yeesh.
4 Ever try to do a website? It's about the most
frustrating thing in the world, aside from teaching.5 Especially in midsummer.
6 But yeah, it is coming along nicely, I think.
7 The Chaplin stuff came in a moment of absolute
anguish. I was ready to tear my hair out, when
I reached up and realized I had none.8 Well, the big news is that Mr. Ken Ponticelli
is now the Band Director extraordinaire at
Indy. Isn't that swell?9 Well, I take off for Jupiter in about four days,
so enjoy this, if you actually get here. I will
definitely be attempting to archive the DN's
from here, as well as adding other fun stuff
to this site.10 I began this entire process by trying to learn
this ancient Egyption language called HTML.
HTML is really simple, if you like trying to
memorize the Koran. I learned a little, but
did an end around, and, well, here we are:
The very first Daily News online! Yippee!11 Well, gottago. Jupiter awaits. Peace.
18 Haha. It wasn't much, but an interesting thing. I found it funny that I originally told people that I went to Jupiter each summer and couldn't be reached. That changed swiftly to Mars, since I am an Aries, and always had a connection to Mars. To this day, when I leave for my actual vacation spot in Tahoe, I'm officially on Mars.19 Here's the link to that page so you could see the graphics:
20 I had met the immortal Maggie Pham earlier in the school year, and she not only knew grammar, but also knew all things about creating websites. She steered me to some HTML sites, all of which got lost on me, but to this day, I thank her for her support and goodly manners. I eventually asked her if there was an easy-to-create website, and she looked at me like I had twelve heads. She finally said, "Do you mean like, a Xanga?"
21 At that point, I was on the way. I began loving Xanga, because it was SO easy, and I quickly created a website for my English classes, so they could easily go to it to see homework, stuff we did in class that day, and a comment area for them to ask questions about classwork.
22 Few used it, but that was also arguably the first School Loop. I still looked, and amazingly few teachers had anything remotely close.
23 After many bouts with geocities' incompetence, I finally launched the first DN Xanga on May 16, 2004. I had the DN going in the hallway all that time, but it wasn't quite as interesting to the students as it had been in the golden age of the late 90's.
24 I finally started writing the DN for alumni, and at the end of each school year, students who had worked closely with me began receiving DN's from my aol account. Within no time, I had an entire group that I cherished, and to whom I sent all things DN. I admit now that the choices of who got them was a bit arbitrary, but were people who always gave a lot to the department. I had already been mailing people the DN, but once it went Xanga, it took on a life of its own.
25 I soon gave up on Xanga as a fancy means of communicating with the entire school, and began focusing solely on using it in its present state, which is still pretty much the same style as always.
26 After that, I tried moving it so that it not only informed, but kept people entertained, on almost a daily basis. Well, attempted to keep people entertained.
27 I'm glad I did, and just this year, I decided to get a Facebook, and to send the DN out to a much larger audience.
28 I might have lost a step or two in humor and outrageousness, but the final product is what you all receive on a mostly daily basis. Yes, I always did stop it during school breaks and holidays, as well as for the entire summer, but it has now entered its fourteenth year, and is going stronger than ever.
29 As we move to the Easter break, it's fun to think that the DN will be gone for a little over a week, but it is also a time for me to relax, to have a few icy lemonades, for me to enjoy the upcoming baseball season with my Dad, and all the rest.
30 So yeah. That's as brief a history of the DN as I could cram into a lazy Wednesday night. I have a box of classic DN's in storage at my school. I think the oldest I have is from 1997. Posting them and sharing them would be a monumental task, and right now, I have little time even to breathe. I may cruise through them this week though.
31 One thing I LOVE is that the DN pre-dated Facebook, and many of my readers also pre-date Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr. and all the rest. Of that I am proud.
32 The old geocities link still works, although I can't even remember how to access it, nor to work with it. I had paid for an upgrade a few years back, and they still made it impossible to work on the thing. I once tried to copy/paste the Heidi Chronicles onto a Xanga, and it took over the entire Xanga, rendering it impossible to do anything, so that website needs to be visited, but don't copy and paste stuff: it might grow! It is sort of fun to go look at it, but the very fact that I can't fix it up is bothersome.
33 And the message board got taken over by imbeciles, of course. I don't have the patience to figure out how to go through that thing and clear it out. It did work as a sort of clunky Facebook a few years ago, and alumni did get to it, but the whole thing was like putting together an online scrapbook. It was really hard, and I simply slipped into the very awesome Xanga.
34 Ironically, as of today, April 1, 2010, this particular Xanga has notified me of these three things:
You have no subscriptions!
You have no friends!
You have no blogrings!
35 Fine time to tell me, right in the middle of the night! Well, I say they're wrong! LOLZ. <----------laughing out loudz.
36 So that's a Wednesday night/Thursday morning quick history of the DN. Someday I'll try to give a more precise go of it, but meanwhile, that's about it. Here is the link to the YB Drama Workshop website, now rusting in the weeds. It's an open book, I imagine, but it might be a fun thing for y'all to goof on at work, or when you should be otherwise studying:
37 Thanks to all of you for enjoying the DN over the years. It's the real deal, and I will be back after our Spring break, which is all next week. I hope to bump into a few of you during that time.38 'Til then...
39 Live life.
40 Love life.
41 Peace.
~H~
www.xanga.com/bharrington
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