About Furweb.com

On March 10, 1999, Simion Lonewolf opened up The Furry Web Directory, arguably the best categorical search engine of the Furry Fandom. The Furry Web Directory stemmed from the frustration many, including himself, have had with Yahoo. If you were to look right now at the Furry Fandom's niche in Yahoo, you can see that some of the sites are outdated, and surely you've seen some fantastic sites that are better than those listed, and yet somehow those sites will never be listed on Yahoo.

The Furry Web Directory was created as an answer to the Fandom's need of someplace that would justly review the contents of web sites, and list them appropriately in a clear and easy-to-navigate fashion. Sure, the Fandom already had sites like The Furry Resource Page, Yiffle (now defunct) and The Furry Search (now defunct), but something was missing. Namely, it was the directory approach — you usually couldn't look up someone by what they did. Wanted to find a fursuiter so you could ask them a few question about building a fursuit? Or wanted to find another artitst or writer like yourself? It's just one click away with The Furry Web Directory — something the other engines can't claim.

In late May, a little over two months after its creation, the 60-submission web site had outgrown its original methods and Simion restructured the inards to use a more programmatic approach. Origianally, he created a Visual Basic program that interpreted e-mail entries and created HTML snippets from them. He then had to place those snippets into the approprite file for each category by hand. The new way was database-driven, using Microsoft Access 97 and Visual Basic 5. There was still quite of bit of handwork involved (the submissions were still handled via e-mail, and the new HTML had to be uploaded to the server via FTP) but the solution did help with rudimentary submission administration and HTML generation.

Sometime in the winter of 2000, Simion started working on a completely online implementation of The Furry Web Directory using Microsoft's IIS and Access 97 during some free time at work. However, it never took off because of the lack of affordable IIS hosting solutions available. And at the time, there were no comparatively easy and mature server-side scripting and database solutions for Unix being offered by web hosting providers.

In August 2000, Simion moved The Furry Web Directory off of his old ISP-provided web space and onto a dedicated hosting service using a domain name. Although the hosting service was not what he was looking for, it did finally get The Furry Web Directory one step closer to becoming a real directory. People can easily access the site with www.furweb.com.

From that point and up until the end of 2001, The Furry Web Directory slowly grew. The methods used suited the situation fine enough. But things would eventually get a bit out of hand. In January 2002, Simion got laid off from his programming job. Time quickly diminished as he scrambled to stay afloat in an insurmountable amount of debt. The Furry Web Directory suffered as a result. The Access 97/Visual Basic 5 solution was making it hard to keep up on the steadily rising number of submissions, and didn't allow anyone else to help him out. The site jumped around between a few hosts until finally landing on FurTopia.

In July 2003, site maintenance became impossible as Simion got fired (unfairly by the account of most) from his next job. Simion took up another, but that one only lasted a little over three moths due to what can be best described as junior high school antics that were not going to be resolved by management. Simion called out for help with converting the site to a PHP/mySQL solution. Someone finally answered in September, but apparently fell out in October. By that time, Simion was getting his fill of antics and was about to quit his job. At the end of October he did, and took up yet another one in November. From the little time left in 2003, Simion settled in to his new job and started looking into doing the conversion himself.

In January 2004, Simion started the process himself. The solution was easy enough, but with only a handful of free hours during 5 days of the week, the development time became exaggerated, even with 2 days of the week left completely to his own whim. Tax time didn't help, of course, but then again, it never does.

In April 2005, Nocte picked up where Simion left off, and changed the look and feel of the site to match the rest of Furtopia. Some new features were added as well.