About Us - Nutcan.com

The Early Years

Nutcan.com was originally Page 3. It was conceived as the brain child of Matt and Jon and then brought into the world via the boredom of Jeremy. Matt and Jon envisioned starting a webpage. Actually, it wasn't a vision so much as it was an occasional off hand comment. Jon would often make comments along the lines of, "I need to put that on my website," if something of interest happened. (See Jon was ahead of his time, this was before the Blogging craze took off. At the time you pretty much needed your own site if you wanted your worthless thoughts broadcast to the masses.) Jeremy, who was bored and had recently purchased Microsoft Office through UWEC, messed around with Frontpage and managed to create a basic layout for the pages. He cleverly named the website "Page 3" in honor of ESPN's Page 2. It was even the same color scheme as Page 2 originally, but the 'joke' was lost on most people who just complained about the ugly colors.

The website was uploaded to Jeremy's free Charter webspace (after it had been pretty much rewritten in static HTML, by hand, due to Frontpage's overall crappitude.) with a couple of articles for content. The staff consisted of Matt, Jon, Sarah, and Jeremy. They occasionally attempted to spread the word and recruit readers. The earliest version of the Page 3 that still exists can be seen here.

The Intermediate Years

Jeremy's friend Bret (who pokes his head in every so often to spread the proclimation of his "1337"ness) was playing around with PHP for a site he was working on. Jeremy saw his work of art and set out to make myriad improvements to Page 3 and create a masterfully rebuilt Internet juggernaut. He fell woefully short. However, given sufficient time and motivation he slowly evolved it and added features. Eventually, Page 3 was moved off Jeremy's Charter account and onto a server at the UWEC campus. The URL 'page3.gotdns.com' was obtained and still works to this day.

Page 3 continued to be revised, with new looks and major overhauls being made at completely random arbitrary intervals. Determined to play with the big boys, the staff made the decision to purchase a 'real' domain. This generated about as little excitement and discussion in the Page 3 community as possible, and Nutcan.com was eventually settled on (more or less by default since it was just about the only suggestion, as well as being one of the few combinations of letters still available as a domain name).

The Current Years

Nutcan.com had a decent look and a new domain, but that all hid its one glaring flaw. It was written basically for the sole purpose of Jeremy learning PHP and as such it was riddled with marginal code, bad code, and a lot of ill-conceived crack-pottery. Gaping wounds were being band-aided constantly and implementing new features was becoming a hassle hardly worth undertaking.

Eventually the whole site was canned (ha). The data was reorganized and the code was rewritten from the ground up. Common routines actually became common routines. AJAX was brought into the fold. A brand new Nutcan of opinions was opened on the world. These are exciting times here at Nutcan, including the addition of 'Jr. Staffers' Alex (aka icbeast) and Scott.

Expect new content and features to pop out of the Can early and often. In the meantime, read a freaking article!