Viking Lars | Saturday, 30 September 2023
It’s been fun, 25 years - it’s hard to believe, actually. I’m sorry, but I’ll take the next 25 as well, so you’ll have to keep up with my antics. Or keep skipping them, course. The odd thing is that I have actually been along since the very beginning. I found Sexyloops on the internet in 1998. The forum was small an fairly few people participated. I was quite excited to find it, because I had read a few of Paul’s articles in Fly Fishing & Fly Tying and I clearly remember the one entitled, Sexyloops, that Paul mentioned. A picture of a trout bum (and a leather cowboy hat) with a fanny pack casting really sexy loops was enough to catch my attention.
I think I’ve told this story before, but it seems appropriate now on Sexyloop’s anniversary. After a little while on the Sexyloops forum, I got a message from Paul. I was a bit star struck, being directly contacted by real fly fishing celebrity (how little did I know). Paul sent the message to thank me for my participation on the forum. That maybe says more about the number of users than it does about me. But 25 years later it’s obvious that we shared opinions and most importantly, humour. Man, the talks and discussions we’ve had - especially around camp fires. I’ll try and keep this FP not-too-long, but I have to tell the short story about one of them. Are fate and luck real? Paul argued that they are - I argued they weren’t. Paul was sure luck was real, because he once knew a man who won twice in the lottery. After a while with wondering how much money he might have spent for how many years and such, we arrived at the common stand point that “luck” can be sought out. If you try harder, you’re more likely to succeed. And then minutes later, as a side note, Paul said: “He did of course go blind a few years later”. That was one of the best laughs I’ve ever had.
Back to the beginning of my direct involvement. I think my first contributions were a few articles and then we met for the first time, in 2001, I think. A few of us met here in Denmark to fish. After a week, Paul was off to somewhere else. Almost with one leg out the door, he said: “Oh, I won’t have internet for the next week or so, can you run Sexyloops for me?”. He might have said please too. 30 minutes of HTML-crash course and how to upload to FTP and he was off. One week of daily front pages followed. That mean over 20 years of direct involvement. I sometimes regret not having backed up everything, even though I assume it’s still sitting somehere, deep the in back end vortex of Sexyloops.
See, back then everything was done in HTML code. FPs, articles - the works. Manually coded, of course. I think we used three. One for the head line, one for the body next and one for the PoD. I learned some HTML-code and although much of it could be done by copy-pasting text into a template document, every now and then we needed something a bit more advanced. I had a big book on HTML. Sometimes I wonder why I had a book, rather than searching out the information I needed on the internet?
Happy days and loads of fun. Happy days also when Paul announced that he was having a CMS developed. Those of us hard core HTML-people know that stands for “Content Management System”. When you have the right URL, a user profile and can remember your username and password, you can access it. “This will make things a lot easier”, he said. I’m not sure it did, because it’s full of loop holes and half the bloody thing is in Hungarian. In order to upload the PoD, I need to first write and upload the head line and body text, then generate the URL and save the whole thing. If you’ve remembered to tick off the right boxes and do a few more necessary operations, then the page is live. Then I have to open the editor and access the page again to upload and save the PoD. But one important functionality is that a page can be written and uploaded with a publication date in the future. If one was to look for long enough, probably even in separate time lines. But as with everything else, once you are familiar with it (and expand your Hungarian vocabulary a little) it’s smooth and working well. Although it keeps reminding me that it works best on FireFox or Mozilla. It works perfectly well on Safari. Well, maybe I could save text and PoD at the same time if I used FireFox? Of course the man says: “I’m having a new one developed and it’ll be really good!” Oh, I can’t wait :-).
There are the regular weekly writes, most of which do everything by themselves and there are a few, especially of course the guest writes who don’t. And to the man’s credit, Paul does most it for those who don’t know the system.
Then of course, there’s the day-to-day running of the entire beast. It’s not rare that I get a message on WhatsApp early in the morning: “Hey dude, I’m heading to a far, unexplored corner of the known universe and I won’t have internet for a while. Can you keep things running?”. Sometimes I, and probably other regular writes too, will send a message the other way: “Hey, I forgot it’s Saturday today and I’m fishing, can you put something up for me. I’ll cover for you Monday if needed.” Somehow it seems that the least used function of the CMS is that “publish in the future-feature” :-). Since I apparently am quite good at forgetting Saturdays, I'm often amazed at Paul's level of organisational skills. Every Saturday morning I get a meassage from him, reminding me it's Saturday. And generally I don't understand how we mange so much communication over WhatsApp with Paul in Malaysia, me in Denmark. It must be due to Paul's non-existent consistent sleeping pattern.
Have a great weekend!
Lars
PoD: From the early days.