About DCShows.net
DCShows.net is a website dedicated to local punk, metal and hardcore music in the D.C., Baltimore, Richmond and greater mid-Atlantic region. My "name" is strangebeer and I'm the one-man army behind this site.
Established in 2002, DCShows.net was an excuse to teach myself PHP so I could get out of my dull job as a software tester and into the exciting world of 2AM software development in the dark to the soundtrack of German industrial music. There was already a local site called pheer.com that listed local shows and I thought replicating the show listings was a simple enough task that I could also teach myself MySQL. The skills I learned did eventually earn me a job as a perl developer.
In my free time, before the proliferation of digital cameras and the advent of photo sharing sites like flickr, I had a 3 megapixel digital camera that I took to local shows. With no place to dump the hundreds of photos I took every night, I thought this "DC Shows" web project I was working on would be a good place to deposit them en masse. No color balance, no cropping, no post processing. Just a transfer from the memory card to my computer, a batch resize using irfanview, and a mass FTP upload to a directory where the MiG photo gallery software would take care of the gallery building. Though the photos are no longer online, rest assured I still have them all (2003 - 2006) and will be looking to re-establish the gallery in a more Drupal-friendly way.
I eventually stopped taking pictures as my small DC4800 had finally given up the ghost after too many mosh pits and spilled beers. I retreated a bit from the scene as I found myself with more responsibility during my day-life and I sought to put some distance between my body and the less healthy aspects of the night life -- smoking, drinking and take-out food. The site waned and grew stagnant, but remained online and still saw traffic.
In March of 2009, the grandfather of the DC/MD/VA internet community, the pheerboard, was shut down by its owner, Pablo. The first day it was inaccessible, Pablo and I chatted over a lengthy e-mail exchange about the board. He expressed his frustration about the about the negative attention he received regarding the pheerboard and how it conflicted with the goals of pheer.com as a place where people of all ages could come to learn about local music and communicate openly, hopefully growing into a stronger community. Pablo vacillated about what to do with the pheerboard, citing that while he did not like its content, he knew people used it. We discussed a few options he could implement that may alleviate the problems, but when I offered to stand-up another message board to take the pheerboard's place, he opted to take it down. His only request was it was not be called the pheerboard.
In the early Spring of 2011, DCShows.net was hacked by a script kiddie. Every page on the site was defaced as an eminem track on repeat followed you throughout. After a cursory look through the software, I decided I did not want to untie the ridiculous knot that was PHP code I had written many years prior and an elusive few lines of malicious code. I opted to start anew with another web host and an open source content management system that I knew would both be secured by an active development community and would allow for growth in functionality: I installed Drupal 7.
It is now 2012 and I am just now learning to actually use and manipulate Drupal. I will be recreating the functionality that was once on the old, pre-Drupal DCShows.net with the addition of a few more. Dead links will be pruned, the old show calendar will be re-established, and a directory of venues, bands and promoters will be listed.
And there you have the complete(ly abridged) history of DCShows.net.
--strangebeer