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Happy 5th Anniversary To Us! HopNews turns 5
by Robert Falcione September 24, 2008 — The internet registry can confirm that HopNews.com, officially known and trademarked as Hopkinton NewsTM, has just passed its fifth anniversary of creation, which was September 11, 2003. Way back then, there was no Town Charter, no Town Manager, no Legacy Farms, no Main Street Specialties or Sauce on Main, and the Harveys were going through tedious hearings to expand their business into Hopkinton.
The Charter Commission had yet to be elected, and furthermore, former
Selectman Dick Gooding had yet to write a
Ann DiLeo sent us her weekly "Senior Moments" column, long before a spade was turned at the Senior Center, and the Police Station demolished with a new one built in its stead.
On one day in December, 2003, the HopNews counter logged over 100 visits for the
24-hgour period, a milestone that That same counter saw 3,578 visits today, and over 2.15 Million to date since creation. Very early on, this writer had to write all of the html code that built the pages, until a certain dispatcher recommended Microsoft FrontPage, which has turned out to be an invaluable asset. The Town Talk page is an exclusive feature of that development tool. Thanks, Dave. At the beginning of HopNews, most websites did not extend below the computer screen (Remember?), because they were designed for dialup, which was the majority method of logging on at the time (Kids, with dialup, you could not watch movies online or see large photos. Scary, huh?). AOL's main page never extended past the bottom of the screen, and they only had three stories that they rotated out every three or four days. Heck, I thought, HopNews can do better than even AOL. The trend of a coming broadband revolution was obvious. We had the ability to take large photos, due to new technology from Adobe, that facilitated shrinking the size of a photo file up to one tenth of its original file size, while keeping the quality. We put up sound files and movies right away in a move that most website operators would not do for at least a couple of years. Everything changed for HopNews in January, 2006, when Neil Entwistle murdered his beautiful wife and baby in their newly rented Hopkinton home. The HopNews studio became a Mecca for Boston television reporters, and eventually national television reporters, before Entwistle's arrest, when we let out that we knew facts they did not. The ripples of our participation in that long news story extended until this June, when TRU-TV (Formerly Court TV) invited yours truly to appear for two separate interviews during the trial, which HopNews covered in part. Back in 2006, WHDH-TV had a token website that hardly ever worked, and others were mere shadows of their current selves, while HopNews grew in prominence, features and content. There were other tragedies and moving events in Hopkinton following that double-homicide in 2006. Some people lost their lives, while others became heroes. Hopkinton lost beloved Townie Cookie Kumlin, and saw his marathon split into two starts. We saw the triangle at the Dough Boy named for him. The town grew. And now we see others doing what we do; in some cases improving to compete in our market, because of what we do; and yet others because they have the same vision we have. One day, the media will converge into some sort of thing similar to the internet as we know it today, which is proving to be the greatest invention since Gutenberg's printing press. Being a part of this revolution in communications has been a stunning and humbling privilege — and one heck of a ride! The readers, writers, photographers, contributors and advertisers, all believers and visionaries, have helped build HopNews, one day, one post, one story, one photo and one email at a time. Thank you to all |
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The Hopkinton News TM online only at HopNews.com ©2008 HopNews.com All Rights Reserved. 508-435-5534
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series of articles promoting a
charter. In addition to Mr. Gooding's coming articles, his nephew sent
to us a series of stories and photos from his mission of building
schools in Afghanistan during those first months.
did not go unnoticed. The visits followed our
coverage of Mary Harrington Day at the Hopkinton Country Club. Someone
joked that all of her relatives must have logged on.