Realmers. Your hamlet has become a metropolis.

Not too much nostalgia re the Realm (I was a member, but not terribly active), but I can tell you a few stats re this metropolis.

1) We routinely get 100 new members every week now, and the average new members/week figure goes up every month.
2) We went to 1,000 members in about 6 months (September 2002 to March 2003). But we went to 2,000 members about 2 1/2 months after that (March 2003 to the end of May 2003). So we are growing, and the growth is really accelerating. It wouldn't shock me at all if we hit the 3,000 member mark between the end of July and mid-August.
3) We get a lot of newbies who head straight to Original Writing. Since this is a place where we're doing promotions, we're really happy that they're working so well.
4) We get a smaller number of newbies who head directly for Philosophy. This is another area that we are promoting so we're thrilled that the targeting is working.

Hope this is of interest to you.

Oh yeah, if this is Metropolis, where's Superman? :-D

The origin of the Realm went like this:

I was looking at MSN groups and said. I wanna make one. The name "The Raven's Realm" has it's origins in my love of Poe and the suggestion of Realm was made by a person called The Diva Den for alliterative value. It's original "theme" was art and poetry. All sites have to have a theme.

I didn't want to limit it though. This site is also going to have more diversity in terms of topics.

After a week of learning web design I realized that MSN was very limited so I branched out to other free hosts. I'd use MSN for the message board and the photo albums but I started making pages elsewhere.

It was not long before I realized that free hosts don't allow databases and scripting languages. So if I was to continue my evolution in web design I'd have to move on. At that moment I had to kiss the Realm goodbye.

I started making this site while the Realm continued. And then it opened. It opened witha different "theme" and as such took on a different life.

I still love art and poetry and am in fact planning sister sites (that would integrate into this one) that would have that "theme".

Since then I have learned as much about web design as I have in all the previous time and I hope that I continue to learn as I develop this and other sites.

Somewhere between then and now I started undertaking commercial projects and have built sites for companies and individuals commercially.

Interestingly enough I still never learned to type and hunt and peck my way. I still don't know anyone who types faster though. :-)

Lenny Bruce does!

Melancholy Dane

Not the never ending word association game? sorry

I remember the Diva Den! From Abuzz ... hilarious posts. Whatever happened to the Diva Den?

I'm still in regular contact with her... she's fine, though going through a hard time of late.

And as alluded to, she had a lot to do with creating the Realm with Craven at the beginning, right? (I was never really a participating member.)

I'm not to great at remembering my life in terms of dates, I remember that the Realm opened around my birthday but I'm not sure how long Diva was involved. It was at least a month and at the beginning she was the co founder.

This of course meant Poe had to share the limelight with Yeats and Poe confided that he did not like that one bit.

i remember diva, (we, diva, jef, and me) used to e-mail each other way back when. jef2k emailed me asking about a2k and how the site was. i expected him to show up here, well maybe later.

never did visit the raven's realm alhtough i was asked to, i was way too busy back then.

Jes--all

Thanks for the information. I think Craven is the resident Man of Steel, or to be avatarily correct--The Gerbil of Steel.

Can't believe Craven can accomplish all this with the hunt and peck.

the gerbil of steel

I was a member but rarely posted, sucked into the vortex of another site as I was. Never did quite figure out how to follow topics, which, looking back sounds ludicrous even to me; I think I didn't try hard enough.