Remember what you were doing a year ago? I sure do. It was Easter Sunday, my wife's grandparents had just left after having dinner, and I was hunched over my laptop, trying to put the finishing touches on a website scheduled to go live in about 8 hours.
That website, of course, was CadetStuff.
How did we get CadetStuff together? As the editor, I get that question every so often in an e-mail, so I stop, wade thru my e-mail archives and put together a coherent answer based on when our e-mails started flying around. I'm certainly no historian...
Concept
The initial concept of a 'site encompassing all things cadet' was borne out of a September 2000 e-mail between myself, Shawn Stanford and Derrell Lipman regarding commonly done wrong drill commands (that eventually became the basis for the original "Drill for Dummies"). Shawn mentioned setting up a site as a central repository for all the good cadet materials & "best practices" out on the net, a website that would be the place to go for all things "cadet."
As the idea evolved, we began to understand that as long as we were collecting the "best" cadet programs materials and locating them all in one place, we should also provide a little more value & content to the equation. We wanted to create something that would hopefully fill the gap left by the departure of the much-lamented "CAP Officer" online journal published by Majs Curt Lafond and Jan Largent, but be perhaps slightly more cadet-oriented.
And a little more tongue-in-cheek.
OK, a LOT more tongue-in-cheek.
While the CAP Officer was a professional journal along the lines of "Armed Forces Journal" or "Proceedings,' Shawn's original concept was an online magazine that was closer to "Leatherneck" meets "Mad Magazine."
We copied a few more people onto the initial e-mail, and soon, our circle of confidants expanded to include a number of folks, not all of whom actually wound up working on the site, but certainly had some input into the shaping of the eventual product. At the same time, we started looking around for some cadets who could come on board and be a part of the team.
What's in a name?
In and amongst all this, Shawn's initial e-mail had a couple domain name ideas, including a really lame one, "CadetStuff.com." Some how, like a bad penny, this name kept coming back at us. In some weird cult-like way, everybody seemed attracted to the name "CadetStuff." Frankly, I started looking around for the vats of spiked Kool-Aid and a Powers Booth-looking guy in a guyaberra shirt and sunglasses.
Derrell Lipman registered the CadetStuff domain name in the ".org" top-level domain in November of 2000, and setup an internal e-mail reflector while we continued to discuss the specifics of what our mission and scope would be. Along about the same time, Dan Routier, commonly known as "Dano" or "Hey you!," set up some webserver space for us on his college network, and an actual, physical website began to take shape.
The blob takes form, then turns into a blob again...
We spent the next four months lining up authors, snarfing cool content from other places, goofing with graphics & layouts and generally causing ourselves a great deal of aggravation and pain. We still didn't have a launch date. The site was constantly in a state of "not quite ready." We tossed around some dates that were far enough in the future to be feasible, but not so close as to cause me to wake up in a cold sweat each night. April 1st was out, as everybody would think that our site was one gigantic April Fools joke. (hahah, little did they know!) April 15th sounded like a nice, even number, someplace in the middle of the month. Of course, after we realized that was Easter Sunday, we moved the date a tad to the 16th of April. Tax Day. (cue the ominous music right here)
Somewhere along the line, I think someone said "Who wants to be in charge of this mob, take one step forward!" and I wasn't listening carefully enough and didn't take a step backwards with my compatriots. Drat! Suddenly I was the "managing editor." Heck, I didn't even know what my job description was!
A plethora of technical glitches, bugs, errors, problems ensued, leading right up to our 16 April launch date. One day, just week or so out from the launch, in publishing part of the site to the production web server, I managed to wipe out the whole forums directory. Ouch. Score one for the managing editor. The tech guys were not happy.
A couple weeks from launch, we sent out a URL to a number of "distinguished" cadet programs folks who we wanted to preview the site and give us feedback. Unfortunately, it seemed, our success was our undoing, as the majority of our feedback was along the lines of "Wow! Cool site!" Not a lot of useful information to be gleaned from that.
About 10 days out, I cobbled together a flash animation for the splash page that was sufficiently vague about the site, yet hopefully would make people visiting our URL come back in a couple weeks to see what this was all about.. We dug up the e-mail addresses of every wing & region director of cadet programs, CAC chair and CAP-related e-mail list we could find and spammed them with a somewhat cryptic message that would hopefully pique their interest to visit.
3...2...1....
After months of work, we were finally "ready" to launch. Only, we weren't even sure we would get anybody to visit. One thing kept running through my mind: What if we open the doors and nobody shows?
Fingers were crossed, and just after midnight on the 16th of April, the covers were yanked back on the site. And like a theater offering midnight showings of "Star Wars," people started visiting. By the end of the first day we had over 430 visitors! Wow. CadetStuff was off to a running start, for sure, but we certainly had no idea where we were running to.
The Evolution of the Site
The first bit of the site was pretty basic. A few leadership articles, this thing called "Drill for Dummies," some recruiting stuff that I had been working on and had a site for already, and a fist-full of features such as an interview with some guy in California who makes videos (George Lucas?), and the serialization of a juvenile fiction novel about Civil Air Patrol from the 1950s. After a couple weeks, we had some more stuff available. The first (but certainly not the last) incarnation of the CadetStuff forums appeared, courtesy our resident Perl guru Matt Johnson, Dr. Drill debuted, and the first of our online leadership quizzes popped up.
Then we rolled in a section called "CadetLife" for your wacky photos and our even wackier captions, and started posting polls on the site to let our readers sound off with their opinions. Later we offered up CadetStuff t-shirts (which took us a little while to actually sell..) Meanwhile, we adopted Scott Matthews, CA Wing's answer to Kevin Smith, as a bit of an income tax dodge and asked him to send us reports during his 5-week tour of all the National Cadet Special Activities. At the end of the summer, the NCSA tree began dropping fruit as our "in the field" correspondents sent in their reports about each of the special activities they attended.
Mike Crockett from our staff journeyed to the National Boards in September, taking one of the first CadetStuff t-shirts along for General Anderson, our former National Commander and CadetStuff reader. Meanwhile, the NCSA articles kept rolling in the door, and our ethics section was graced by the words of Professor Davida Kellog, a University of Maine professor and on of our nation's foremost military ethics minds. Later, USAF Reserve Capt Bob Morgan from LA Wing graced us with his cunning photography from Advanced PJOC, and we resurrected the cadet newsletter "CadetReach" as one of our new sections. We jumped across the pond, so to speak, with some leadership lessons from Lt Col Michael Marra, an active-duty USAF squadron commander in Europe, and an article on shoe-shining by a Royal Naval Reserve Midshipman.
The beginning of the new year caught us wrapping up "Squadron Alert," the novel serialization from the 1950s. 19 chapters of real, live "gee-whiz" fiction. The CadetStuff store finally opened after months of anticipation, complete with a fictional product that hooked a number of readers. Quick, get the net! We gotta land this one! Some staffers, contributors and readers rallied up at Hawk Mountain in early February for the Hawk Mountain Winter Search & Rescue course. Partly to provide a good excuse to get a number of folks together face-to-face, but also to get good winter training from the experts at Hawk. And we even got a two-part article out of it!
As we wound up the year, apart from our normal features and columns, the only exciting thing about our March issue was a new serialization to replace Squadron Alert, called "Drummond Island Declassified."
So now we're here, in April of 2002. Over 10,000 visitors in the last year... Amazing
Where do we go from here?
I ask myself that all the time.
We're presently investigating different software packages to help streamline each month's publication and to make the site more user friendly and easy to navigate, along with promoting more timely updates. Perhaps in a year, we'll have branched off somewhat, and begun to encompass JROTC cadets, Naval Sea Cadets, ACA cadets, and maybe even international cadet corps from around the world. I'd sure like to see us bring on board twice the number of cadets we presntly have on staff.
But more importantly, CadetStuff will still continue to bring you the best cadet-related items from around the globe.
Who knows what the future brings. The first year was a riot. Stick around and see what happens next!