Xenite.Org has launched many successful, popular sites through the years including Xena Online Resources, SF-Fandom, a feature section on Houston salsa dancing, and a Grace Park fan site.

Xenite.Org 10th Anniversary

10 Years of Great Web Sites

our original mods are no longer with us. Such is life on the Internet. But what seems the saddest thing to me is that when I find archived bookmark files from the 1990s and even just a few years ago, I click on so many links to once great sites and find they are gone.

Who remembers the ghosts of yesterday but we stewards of ancient lore who must one day also take ship and set sail for distant shores?

Xenite.Org is my life's greatest work, and I shall never achieve its like again, though I may make many attempts to surpass it. A few months ago I looked at some Web tools that estimate the relative position a domain has among all domains. Out of more than 20,000,000 supposedly active domains, Xenite.Org was ranked between 100,000 and 110,000. If those statistics are to be trusted, Xenite.Org is more popular than 99.445% of all Web sites. We're in the top 1%, almost the top .5%. And according to a very old statistic, Xenite.Org was one of the 1st 1,000,000 Web domains created. I can't really complain about that. More than 1,000,000 people pass through Xenite.Org each year. I hope they find something of value.

Over the past year, as I have watched this 10th anniversary approach, I have tried to think of special ways to celebrate it. "No one will really notice," Dixie said to me recently. She is right. We celebrate so many anniversaries, every magazine and television does so, that what is one more anniversary when it's just for a Web site. When it's just for the 111,000th or so Web site?

Michael Sinelnikoff

Actor Michael Sinelnikoff was a frequent visitor to Xenite.Org when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World was still in production.Actor Michael Sinelnikoff had a long and productive career in Canadian theater and television, serving as a producer for the last few years before he turned to full-time acting. When Xenite.Org created the Web's first dedicated fan forum for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Michael Sinelnikoff joined in our discussions. He quickly became popular among Xenite's visitors, although he eventually transferred his forum time to the official Lost World discussion group.

Michael Sinelnikoff flew to Atlanta to be a guest at Dragon*Con in 1999 and there he and Xenite founder Michael Martinez were finally able to meet in person. "It was a great holiday," Martinez said. "Of all the fantastic, fan-friendly actors and producers I've been privileged meet, Michael Sinelnikoff was the warmest, most open, and encouraging professional."

Despite an invitation to visit Michael Sinelnikoff at his home in Toronto, Michael Martinez has lost touch with the gentleman who charmed television fans around the world as Professor Summerlee. Illness, travel, job obligations, and financial constraints prevented Martinez from fulfilling a promise he always hoped he would keep.

Xenite.Org was nonetheless enrichened and blessed by Sinelnikoff's participation and support through difficult transitions.
As a published author, Michael Martinez has been interviewed on radio, television, and in print.  His occasional publicity campaigns have helped to promote Xenite.Org as well as his books.Well, it represents ten years of my life -- more than ten years. That means a great deal to me. When all else has gone wrong, Xenite.Org has remained steadfast, enduring the dot-com meltdown, search engine turmoil, and bitter disputes that really should never have occurred. I spent three weeks picking the right domain name (although I probably should have gone with .COM). I spent several weeks working out our slug line, "Worlds of Imagination on the Web". I spent many long nights learning to write Perl code, dissecting scripts, improvising new interfaces, and creating ugly page designs that were functional, easy to reuse and update, and creating a horde of behind-the-scenes scripts that you know nothing about.

So it's our 10th anniversary and we're going to celebrate it. And I have just the thing, although I wish I had more time to finish it. In fact, I've had six years to finish it, but through all those years I never found the time.

An early concept design for the proposed cover or entry page for Xenite.Org TodayIn April 2001 I asked several people to participate in a project that was going to be called Xenite.Org Today. It was to be a glossy magazine-style Web layout with interviews from actors and television show writers and producers and some very prominent Xena fans who helped make some of my projects both memorable and successful. We had an editor and a Web designer who were going to put the site together. I had the interviews under way. And then the editor and designer both fell out of the project.

There was no way I could do the site myself, and Dixie was still not quite there yet. So I tabled the project. But I've managed to hang on to several of the emails through multiple hard drive crashes and changes of computers. So even without the glossy mag-style layout, and despite the fact that the television shows are no longer in production, here is my gift to you, loyal visitors: I present Xenite.Org: The Lost Interviews.

Enjoy.

And thank you all for being here, whether you just found us or have been dropping by for many years, looking for the newest, craziest content. If I could do it all over again, knowing what I know now, it could certainly have been technically better in many ways -- but there will always be only one Xenite.Org. And this is it.

--Michael Martinez, founder, Xenite.Org (March 14, 2007)


Site Map    Contact Us


This page is Copyright © 2007 by Michael L. Martinez. All rights reserved. No electronic copies may be made without prior written consent, except as occurs in normal browsing caching and search engine indexing. You may print this page for your own personal use.

Xenite.Org 10th Anniversary is a Xenite.Org Web site.