While Friday the 13th might be unlucky for most people, for us here at Airlock Alpha, it's been a double blessing.

First of all, it's Airlock Alpha's sixth anniversary. That's right, we have made it through six years on the Internet. But more about that in a moment.

As of this writing, it seems like the Tampa Bay, Florida, area -- where Airlock Alpha is headquartered -- barely avoided Hurricane Charley, one of the worst hurricanes to hit this area in more than a decade. While it was supposed to make landfall here, it looks like it will almost avoid us completely.

We have had some interesting times over the last couple of years. Recently, we did a management shakeup of the SyUniverse Group, and welcomed some new faces to our staff. We now have writers like Brian Meskimen, Alan Stanley Blair and Jeremy Van Cise. Also on staff is Leigh Ashton as an assistant programmer and writer, and Rebecca Yoo as our lead programmer. Still going strong with us is Bryant Griffin as our lead designer. We're working on a new look for the site that should be launched sometime in the near future.

Anyway, just a little history about the site. We (I use "we" in a figurative sense) first launched the site Aug. 13, 1998. I had just signed on to the Internet for the first time literally days before, and decided it was time to have a Web site. I knew very little about the Web ... but what the hell. I knew I was going to do it.

Syfyman's World was first opened on GeoCities. In a few days, and after a whopping 12 hits, I changed the name to simply SyFy World. I originally was considering using the name "Scifiman's World," but the spelling just didn't work right for me, and I wanted something both unique and eye-catching. So, taking a bit of inspiration from Lynyrd Skynyrd, I came up with "SyFy."

Over the next few months, I tried different things, including news and such, to try and improve the site and get people to come visit us. We had a pop-up poll, a trivia game, a page remembering past science-fiction actors and crew who had passed on, and other things.

Originally, SyFy was going to be strictly Star Trek, but we decided to expand it a little ... and that was a good thing, too. It wasn't our Star Trek coverage that put SyFy on the map. Ironically, it was another Gene Roddenberry creation, "Earth: Final Conflict" that did it.

I had found several sources inside the show, and before I knew it, I was getting episode spoilers well in advance. At first, we drew attention to our spoilers, but few believed what we had was true. But when the third season started, and our accuracy was in the high 90 percentile, people began to really take notice, and our hits jumped.

By late 1999, SyFy World had established itself, and it was beginning to outgrow the non-dependable GeoCities server. That was TrekNation -- which is associated with TrekToday -- stepped in and offered to host SyFy World.

The new "partnership" was beneficial to both TrekNation and SyFy World. TrekToday was starting to groupw, and with it came SyFy World. But despite the success of the site, the workload was beginning to wear on me, and the hours I had to spend each to make an update when I was receiving no compensation whatsoever was starting to not make sense. I continued, only because every time I said I wanted to give it up, visitors to the site would start writing me en masse, begging me to stay.

All of that came to a head in Spring 2001 when I felt the site needed a major redesign, and I just no longer had the know-how to update the site to the level that other sites had advanced to. I was about to throw in the towel when I had learned that Greg Boubel -- one of the more innovative designers on the Internet -- had been considering dropping news coverage from his site, Star Trek Portal.

I didn't want to do Web design anymore, he didn't want to write news anymore. I wanted to write more news, and he wanted to do more Web design. I seemed like a perfect fit, so I contacted him.

We began discussing ideas immediately, and before long, an agreement had been made to merge the two sites as Airlock Alpha. Both Star Trek Portal and SyFy World almost immediately shut down, and SyFy actually did most of its news coverage through its YahooGroup while Greg busily worked on the new design of the site.

With plenty of fanfare, Airlock Alpha opened in late May 2001, with more than 8,000 people stopping by on its first day. Since then, more than 15 million people have visited the site, keeping SyFy one of the more popular stops on the Web for those looking for non-repeating, relevant science-fiction entertainment news from a variety of programs and movies.

In 2002, Greg decided to pursue other interests off the Internet, leaving Airlock Alpha in my possession. I didn't know what to do with this, since I was just the news guy and promotional guy. I had no idea how to run the special internal programming features Greg had developed, or to complete the redesign I wanted done so badly. I actually considered shutting down Airlock Alpha, and was preparing the announcement when some friends who frequented the site decided to step in.

The new informal management group that was formed was SyUniverse. All of us have spent ever since then working on making the site even better. In 2002, in time for our fourth anniversary, we launched a new logo and completely new look.

We here at Airlock Alpha want to thank all of you for making the site possible over the last six years. No one involved with the site has ever made any money doing this, but it's definitely our loyal and new visitors who keep up wanting to do this day in and day out.

Thanks for making Airlock Alpha part of your daily Internet experience!

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