Saturday, March 29th, 2008...7:31 am
Tampa Bay Satire 1997-1998
Before CriticalMAS existed I had a personal web site hosted with a local ISP in the Tampa Bay area. The site had a very popular local radio guide called What’s the Frequency Tampa?. It listed radio programming schedules much like television schedules are displayed. I built it by writing a program with Visual Basic 3.0 that generated HTML pages locally. Once the build was finished, the pages were uploaded. This was before Microsoft released Active Server Pages. Good times.
In addition to the radio portion of the site, there was a local coffee guide and some satire. The two pieces of satire that survived the last decade were local parodies of USA Today. The HTML was written for much smaller monitors and old-timey browsers, so they look awful as is today. However, using screen captures and PhotoShop I was able to restore a close approximation of the originals.
The original MAS Today was released in July 2007 and was a local hit. The Tampa Tribune contacted me for a story on the top local web sites. On 9/29/97 they did a front page article in the BayLife section featuring a screen shot of my web site, some quotes from me and my photo. It didn’t take much to get early web fame back in 1997. Today I would have to get tased while singing a Rick Astley tune. Those were simpler times.
Much of the humor below won’t make sense to people that didn’t live in the Tampa Bay area during that time period.
View Larger Image of MAS Today Summer 1997
Success always invites a sequel. Just prior to leaving Florida, I created another MAS Today. It was a little darker and more cynical look at the Tampa Bay area. The second MAS Today was released in August 1998.
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