News

Twenty years ago today I was a 14-year-old kid on a 33.6k dial-up modem punching names of things I liked into a site that purported to give out free ad-supported domain names. Eventually I hit on one that was available. Thus, Oasisband.net was born.

What started as just a random collection of junk I was interested in grew into a major creative outlet for many of us. We argued and illustrated and sang our hearts out. We were a community in the truest sense, and in a way I have not experienced in life since.

I am beyond grateful for the happiness and joy Oasisband brought me, and for setting me on a path to learn the skills I still use in my career today.

Happy 20th Anniversary to us!

I wish us all the best!

Holy cow, two news posts in one day!

I was poking around some old data, and found a number of posts that were never ported back in the previous rewrite of 2008. This includes a fair number of game reviews, as well as the entire "Others" section.

They've only been missing from the site since 2008!

It took just over 10 years(!) to get out the door, but a full rewrite of Oasisband.net in a maintainable modern MVC framework is now live - you are looking at it.

In reality there have been a lot of false starts at a rewrite. This time I figured instead of having a moving target of improvements, I would be better off just getting a visually identical version out the door ASAP and then fix from there.

If I've done my job correctly it should be hard to even notice anything is different.

I'm skeptical anyone other than myself is still interested in Oasisband, I've been looking for an outlet for some things I'd like to write that would not fit on my professional blog.

Coming soon:

• Comics
  I have a couple comics hanging out that have never been posted. I'll get those up ASAP
  These are in fact now up.
• Layout Cleanup
  A lot of things with the current design really irk me. Namely text alignment being all over the place.
• Responsive Design
  I get emails from Google all the time about how Oasisband.net sucks on mobile, so I intend to fix that as best I can.
• Better Author Pages
  It's only been 14 years since I promised them.
• Obloglog
  I did not reimplement obloglog. If you'd like to post something, email me.

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I'm in a way better place to actually implement fixes now that I'm not working around a rats nest.

Believe it or not I still somewhat "maintain" the code of Oasisband.net after all these years. It actually takes a little bit of work here and there to keep it running.

Last night I moved it over to a new web server, and in the process upgraded it to sweet sweet Let's Encrypt powered SSL - taking Oasisband.net boldly into the new millennium.

You can probably notice the wonderful new 'https://' appended to the URLs.

Another major piece of what helped Oasisband.net thrive in its heyday is sadly going away tomorrow. AOL Instant Messenger is shutting down forever.

We used it to communicate; it drove the word-of-mouth spread around the high school. We would never have reached the heights we did without it.

It was the literal backbone of "Oasisband.net" as a community.

Heck, our AIM usernames are still listed on our profiles on the "About Us" pages.

If not for AIM, we never would have found Joel, who provided us with free hosting for almost ten years. Who later provoked me to pursue programming and my career no less!

We all have a lot to thank AOL Instant Messenger for.

On top of everything else, our dear friend and writer Meka T. Slorne, who passed away some years back, at this very moment still shows as online thanks to never having been signed out by his "dumb-phone". I still connect to AIM, and seeing him in my buddy list every day has stood as a solemn reminder.

Today is truly a time for reflection. I'm sad to see it go.

Geocities is shutting down today. I am more than a little disheartened, and will miss Geocities. For all the mocking and scorn Geocities receives, and don't get me wrong, much of it rightly so, what it did do is encourage me, and I'm willing to bet multitudes of other children, to learn HTML. My first couple sites were hosted there, and hell, for a good piece of Oasisband.net's heyday it was hosted there. I cannot humbly thank them enough. It was by this I learned the skill by which now I make my living. As Geocities slips into the night with an almost inaudible wimper, I feel such gratitude and respect.

Rest in Peace, Geocities. You will live forever in my heart, and forever haunt the Wayback Machine.

As the title implies, Oasisband 3.5 is in the works. I know you and I know what you are thinking: “But Jesse, Oasisband 3 was never fully completed”. And you're right, but the work I invested in Oasisband set me up with a decent framework to base other sites off. The problem was it lacked sophistication. It was written awkward and weird, inheriting mistakes from someone learning PHP and MySQL while creating it.

During work on other sites the framework has matured and blossomed into something wonderful. Fully encapsulated modules, much simplified image management, clean up of stacks. I plan to open source this framework at some point in the future, the preemptive name being “phrame” with the note that this is just a codename until something more suitable is found.

Also, as a side note I intend to use this framework on my other site as well, PHPStandards.net which is a work in progress.

Moved from a comment to a post by Jesse Donat

Well I was looking to log onto the server because I wanted to update my Ipod as I forgot to do it before coming. But since I can´t find the ftp server I might as well make a comment on this dead website.

Currently we have no understanding what the media´s role is on the cognitive development of kids. The only studies that are done in this area are studies that attempt to get kids to consume more media and how to go about doing it. But what we don´t know is whether or not kids immersion into the media makes them more or less susceptible to subconsious control through the media.

Does completely omnipresent, unregulated, ever sophisticated, and incredibly addictive forms of media make children better consumers, less like to think creatively and develop resistance and revolutionary attitidues towards our current system of massive thought control...well I would have to think so.

The fear that you might be addressing Jesse is that the government would start playing a role in what kids and others are able to access. Sure, this seems like the common cold war fear that the federal government will be censoring us in order to believe that they are our masters and we should simply lie down and obey.

But on the other hand, what does a completely unregulated media system mean. It means the people that are controlling what we have access aren´t even people that we elected. They are people that are responsible to a system of capitalism that cares not for the individual, cares not for society, but only cares for an increase in the share value for the next quarter.

On one hand we have the federal government regulating, and on the other hand we have a bunch machine like capitalists regulating. It seems necessary that the two forces at least try and balance one another, at least there needs to be some conflict between these two forces. One tries to create new and ever more addictive media, and other tries to think about the consequences and if it believes those consequences are atrocitious they should try and do something.

Rampant government and, or rampant industry provide no hope for a future where the individual is able to think and act freely. Government regulation is a small pebble amongst a massive culture of thought manipulation.

If you haven't already noticed, there is a tear in the upper left. Shame on you, America, for making Oasisband.net cry! Vanity and fear have brought onto this country a great pestilence. We'll see if Oasisband outlasts another president. One not even elected for a day already talking about censoring media.

I would call upon the video game industry to give parents better information about programs and video games by improving the voluntary rating system we currently have. Broadcasters and video game producers should take it upon themselves to improve this system to include easier to find and easier to understand descriptions of exactly what kind of content is included. But if the industry fails to act, then my administration would.

And even if the industry does do some responsible self-policing, there’s still a role for the federal government to play. We need to understand the impact of these new media better. That’s why I supported federal funding to study the impact of video games on children’s cognitive development.

Oasisband.net has not had a post in forever, so here it goes. The Obloglog is, and has been for quite some time, 95% functional with posting everything but images and movie reviews (mostly because movie reviews *require* posting images...) completed. I think the community just fell out in the down time between OB2 and OB3 because not only has no one posted anything, but we have not had a single comment I didn't write since OB3 went up.

Other news, I got my drivers license today, finally. This was my second attempt, the first time featuring me turning from the wrong lane of a one way into a two way... see: here.