Webmaster's Corner
Interview with Old Tom
DFN: This week's interview is with Old Tom, script guru and Vice President of the VNWR Newbie Webmaster Board.
Lets get the real basic stuff first...
Old Tom: My name is Old Tom, I'm 44, and live in Minnesota.
DFN: Why did you pick the nick, Old Tom?
Old Tom: It's a long story, but the coincidence worked out well. When people meet me in person for the first time, they're consistently disappointed. They're expecting "an old guy with a cane." I'm not as old as expected, and I rarely have "just one" cane with me.
When I began posting on adult newsgroups in 1994, it was common practice to post anonymously. The anonymous service I used, allowed you to specify a "nick" for your posts. I chose "Tom" completely at random. Some time later, my computer network reconfigured, and my posts therefore appeared to be coming from a different source. I was assigned a new anonymous id, which also had the option of specifying a nick.
My nick, of course, was Tom. But I couldn't specify Tom, because Tom was already in use (by me!). I sat and steamed about that for a while, and took notice that there was someone else posting by then, also named Tom.
I had been there first - I was the *first* Tom on that forum. So, I took the nick "Old Tom" as indicating my greater longevity on the newsgroup. Years later, of course, "Old Tom" actually does mean "that old guy with the canes."
DFN: How often do you try new building ideas, or using new sponsors?
Old Tom: In one sense the answer is several times every day - it's part of my software development process. In another sense it's every few weeks. I go in cycles.
DFN: And how often do you build new sites?
Old Tom: Do you mean how many per minute, or what?
DFN: We know you are always buried in work... about how many hours a week are you able to put into your business?
Old Tom: Darn near all of them.
DFN: Do you do everything by hand? or do you use some scripts to automate your work?
Old Tom: I do nearly everything by hand. That is, I build my scripts by hand. That didn't really answer your question, but most of what I *do* do is scriptwriting. Jojasa and I have a combination of script-built sites and hand-built sites.
DFN: Do you have any tips for us on how you stay focused and organized working for yourself?
Old Tom: It's difficult. Especially when working at home, it's waayyyy too easy to get interrupted.
DFN: Can you touch on how and why you got involved into this industry, and how long you have been doing it?
Old Tom: See the next item.
DFN: Where do you see yourself several years from now?
Old Tom: At one point I had continuous requests for copies of my newsgroup posts. Jojasa created an archive for me of the stuff I'd written; this became The Old Tom Archive at old-tom.com. We eventually added some advertising. Our first sponsor payout was from MaxCash, Fetish Hotel (of course), the spring of 1999. That gave us our clue.
