How this all started
In 1996, sitting in the office on a cold Winter day I had some downtime and pondered what would be a constructive use of time. Stumbling through this new thing called the World Wide Web, I had to wonder how this stuff worked.
It turned out some of the interns in our office were already playing around with this stuff, so after looking over their shoulders for a few minutes it all started to make sense. After downloading Netscape Server and tool called Hot Dog, I was off and running. We had an older PC that was good enough to run this web server thing, so it was setup in the corner of the office.
After getting a basic understanding of how a page was built, it occurred to me that there was no point in this exercise unless something compelling was produced. This was the early days of the web, so there were not many good models out there to study. If the page was going to be something interesting, why not UGA Football? Heck, as far as I know nothing existed like that yet. But surprisingly yes it did. Brian Sugrue had already done this site called “The Dawg Page” which may have actually been hosted by Mindspring at the time. Of course it had no domain associated with it. It made no sense to clone what he had already done, so it had to be something different. Incidentally, Brian’s site exists today as http://dawgsonline.com
We had a server naming scheme in our office involving planets (Jupiter, Saturn, etc.) This server was chosen as Pluto for some unknown reason. Not yet understanding the relationship between server names and pages, the site was also called “The Pluto Page.” After all, Pluto was best known as a dog character anyway. There were some initial images posted, just because at the time that was considered a marvel. But what if people could come to the site and actually post something? There was this script available called a guest book. Very basic, but it got the fundamental idea going. The site had no domain, and was reachable only by knowing the IP address. How people actually found this server is really beyond comprehension. One thing lead to another, and the guestbook was replaced with a script called WWWBoard. It was certainly more appropriate for the user contribution format. At the time, the AJC had introduced a feature in the paper called “The Vent.” Not being the world’s most innovative person, that spawned the name of the board as “The DawgVent.” Vent was a key word, because in 1996 there was a lot of frustration involved with being a Dawg fan. This was the transition from Goff to Donnan, which is not one of the best times in the program’s history. The site was also renamed “The Junkyard.” Growth of users made it necessary to include a registration system instead of a free-for-all. WWWBoard did not really support this type of thing, but it would with some modifications. The operator of the Hive (sorry cannot remember who) offered some code to get us started. This proves there are some good ones in every bunch. I later passed on the favor by helping the Gamecock board get started.
Soon after that, the Pluto server was drawing enough traffic to impact our office network. I worked out a deal with a good friend (good Dawg) who offered up some of his office bandwidth and a place for this server. It became pluto.centurionsys.com, which was the home for the server until growth caused yet another bandwidth problem. We had to have our own place to keep it going. This was when the user community donated funds to keep this going. Donations were more than I could have ever imagined, so we had plans for a new server housed in a data center facility within a couple of weeks.
With the new server going up, the question was what to name it. Selecting a domain name was not the simplest thing in the world, and it takes a good deal of thought. One afternoon my wife threw out the term Dawgnation, and it stuck. In the years following, the term Xnation was used to refer to many fan bases in all sports. To my knowledge, this moniker did not exist prior to the birth of Dawgnation. Today, you commonly see official websites and hear mentions of Juniornation, Gatornation, etc.
Dawgnation became the home of the DawgVent and ran smoothly for quite some time. Eventually the user base grew so large that the single-server platform could not support it. The large user base also made it difficult to administrate as a hobbyist activity. An opportunity came along to join forces with Alliance Sports (UGASports) and Steve Patterson, which was at the time a small startup in Nashville with content/board sites based on primarily on SEC schools. The DawgVent was then moved to the UGASports site, and remained there for another solid run.
Rivals.com purchased Alliance Sports and built a large national network of sports sites. The DawgVent went along with that move to Rivals, and was hosted there until the company went bankrupt. In a twist of events, Alliance Sports purchased the remaining assets of Rivals and re-launched the network as the current day Rivals.com, where the DawgVent still resides today as part of the Georgia site.
Dawgnation.com was brought back online in 2006 in an arrangement with a party who founded Dawgnation Magazine. The magazine venture was not successful and the rights to use the domain were returned to me again in 2007.
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