City.Net: The First Year



Kevin and Nancy, Summer 1994.

There's something special about making it through your first year. Nancy and I thought you might appreciate knowing a little bit more about our humble beginnings. If you haven't already done so, read the Brief History of City.Net to find out more about how City.Net got started.


Our 1891 "rural vernacular" farmhouse in the Brooklyn neighborhood of southeast Portland.

For the past twelve months, City.Net has been run out of our small farmhouse on SE 11th in Portland, Oregon. We wanted to provide a picture of the "pink room" where the "editorial machines" reside, but it was too small to photograph (7.5' x 13'). Our link to the Net is a 28.8 modem, which works fine most of the time, but seems pretty slow when Nancy and I are both evaluating graphic intensive sites. Before Rowland Smith moved back to North Carolina last June, he coded at his own apartment. So most of our first year of existance we only had three people working on City.Net, yet we had three separate locations; the T1 connection to www.city.net actually resides at a local access provider at yet another address. If you include Brandon Plewe's Virtual Tourist II, then you might even say we had four different locations spread across the United States.

1995 has been a good year for us. Our traffic has literally increased over ten times the daily visits we received in November 1994. Thousands of sites now link to City.Net and tens of thousands of users visit City.Net each day. We're part of both the WebCrawler Top 25 and Lycos 250 lists, which keep track of the popularity of a site based on the number of links to its home page. Web reviewers appear pleased with City.Net as well. Last Spring and then again on October 23, 1995, we made PC Magazine's Top 100 Web Sites list. c|net recently gave us a 5 ball review, Point Communications rates us a Top 10 pick and last summer City.Net was chosen by internetMCI for their Net Revolutionaries tribute. City.Net continues to get rave reviews at AOL, the BBC, Hotwired, MSN, and long time Net favorites such as Scott Yanoff's and John December's lists, plus newer arrivals like the Awesome Lists.

As we prepare for our next year, we would just like to say thanks to all the wonderful users and great sites that have helped make City.Net one of the most popular destinations on the Net! We hope to see you on the trail ahead.

Kevin and Nancy
November 12, 1995



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