Dixie has taken everything I've thrown at her and made it work, mostly. My only regret is a server crash I caused about a month after New Zealand actor Kevin Smith died. We lost everything and had no current backups. Thousands of fan tribute messages were literally wiped out in the space of a second of time.
When Xenite joined a promising advertising network that promised lots of money, processing power, and bandwidth, Dixie helped me upgrade 40,000 pages of content, set up new forum software, and make the transition. And she said nothing very harsh or critical as the server crawled to its knees and thousands of people stopped visiting our domain. She stood by quietly when the checks began to arrive, much smaller than anticipated, and lasting only about 3 months. She pitched in to help move the domain off the dysfunctional server that had been temporarily allocated to us and onto a new hosting service.
When I have not had the money to pay the ever-increasing server fees, Dixie has made up the difference. For now, we do earn enough off on-site advertising to pay the bills. But you never know what the future will bring. I've tried just about everything to make ends meet. I hate the advertising but it works. What can I say? I've turned down "lucrative" advertising deals through the years because they just aren't lucrative enough. Truth be told, I could probably earn quite a bit more each month if I sold links, but I won't do that.
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Xenite.Org has helped to introduce the science fiction fan community to a lot of Web technologies through the years. We tried Internet Radio (which was great until the service shut down for lack of income), Internet Television (which was okay but the programming selections were not all that great), Xena games, polls, community surfing technology, Java-based chat, and things I can't even remember clearly. While everyone else was loading their pages with screen captures and collages, I was constantly looking for content no one else had discovered yet.
And we created a lot of our own content: FAQs, essays, tutorials, news stories, feature articles. I've learned to take pictures (sort of). I've uploaded a few pictures (not great) and I've worked hard to find great merchant partners who offer unique merchandise. I only wish I could have done more, but there were long periods where neither I nor Dixie could really spend much time working on the domain.
We moved the forums to their own domain, SF-Fandom, in 2001. I set up SF-Worlds (twice). I finally took my dwindling homepage and moved it to a proper michael-martinez.com domain. I have helped friends launch and promote Web sites. And I have helped thousands of strangers promote their sites as well. We still operate the largest directory of Hercules and Xena-related content, so far as I know.
But through the years many friends have come and gone. All the volunteers who helped us with Xena content, Andromeda content, and other projects have fallen away. We still have a great group of forum moderators, but even some of
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