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EAS Site History
Since I launched the site in January 1998, EAS has not only grown to a thousand times its original size, but has also undergone a number of technical and stylistic changes. Here is a short history of the site's design and other important milestones. For a much more detailed story, please refer to the inversely chronological update list.
1998
January 1998 EAS goes online on the university server on January 21st. Unlike it was with many other good sites on the web, I haven't been preparing EAS for many months prior to taking it online - I never had much patience and I need to see results soon whenever I'm working something out. Instead of trying to develop the perfect look, I more or less spontaneously take what I already have and upload it. And what I have isn't really much. The first version of EAS consists of pictures of six of my starship designs, a review of the Enterprise-E model (which I have just finished building), an outline of my later time travel analysis, a short list of inconsistencies (not yet including the Klingon foreheads) and a few jokes.
At that time I don't even bother finding a unique title for the site, but I just grab some illustration graphics from the web (actually from the official Star Trek site). Thus the initial heading simply reads "Star Trek" with a sub-heading "by Bernd Schneider".
Reconstruction of the ancient site
July 1998 In July 1998 I christen my site "Ex Astris Scientia" (EAS), a purposely intricate and "intellectual" name in contrast to the many "starbases" and "starships" in the web. There are also some slight changes to the color scheme, since I find that the previous style with mainly black, gray and white looks boring.
In the same month I take the first step to creating one of the site's main features, the Starship Database, beginning with a list of all Starfleet ship classes. The layout is essentially the same that the database still has today. Later that month, I post a first version of my time travel theories.
October 1998 Knowing better how to work with tables and graphics, I make some improvements to the layout, especially of the homepage, in October 1998. Still, the graphics look rather faint and little professional.
November 1998 I compile the Treknology Encyclopedia.
December 1998 We visit the Star Trek World Tour in Düsseldorf and post a humorous report on it.
1999
January 1999 When I compile the first site map, EAS consists of 70 HTML pages (2007: more than 750).
March 1999 With help from the people at the later Flare Forums, I reconstruct the look of the Cheyenne class, the start of a big series of similar starship-related articles. I also begin to scan and post pictures of starships from the Official Star Trek Fact Files, a publication available only outside North America that depicts many canon designs for the first time. This lays the foundation for the Starship Gallery (and it explains why the file and directory is still named "scans" today).
June 1999 The color scheme is modified once again in June 1999, when the obtrusive plain yellow (RGB 255,255,0) is replaced with dark yellow (RGB 255,208,0) and the tables are switched to two shades of pale turquoise, the same colors they still have today. The most obvious modification is the introduction of the EAS arrowhead/star logo.
My first Federation fleet chart is well received in the online community. The first Ex Astris Excellentia Award goes to Medical Log: Supplemental.
July 1999 The TOS episode guide goes online. Also in this very busy month, I open the first EAS spin-off site, the Advanced Starship Design Bureau (ASDB), a group project committed to creating designs for the unseen canon vessels of Starfleet.
October 1999 the Starfleet Museum is launched as another sister site for the pre-TOS starship designs of Masao Okazaki.
November 1999 Since the copyright owner doesn't approve of web use of their images, I remove the little character icons on my homepage in November 1999 although I like them a lot. I replace them with the section graphics, similar to those which are on the site today. I include these graphics to the headers of the sub-sections too.
2000
January 2000 After working on it literally day and night for a couple of weeks, my extensive Voyager episode guide and review is completed up to season 5.
February 2000 After several weeks of trying and testing, a new homepage layout is uploaded in February 2000, again with the links broken down in eight sections. Whilst the graphics will be frequently improved in the following, the layout remains the same for no less than six years!
Also in February 2000, EAS presents the first results of our famous Wolf 359 Project.
March 2000 I post the first draft of The Physics and Technology of Warp Propulsion, the article series that is still not finished today.
April 2000 April Fool's Day! Although my prank is rather crude, I receive several mails from fans who believe that the Defiant was present at Wolf 359. Also in April 2000: launch of the predecessor of today's Subspace Comms Network, then still hosted with a free provider.
July 2000 A big day for my websites: On July 11th they move from the university server to my own domains ex-astris-scientia.org, trekships.org and starfleet-museum.org. I already reserve a fourth international domain, treknology.org that I will later use for the JoAT (in May 2002).
2001
April 2001 Opening of the new EAS Galleries with 550 images (today: 1100), including the popular bridge diagrams.
June 2001 First posting of my Timeline of the Star Trek Universe, a fairly complete list of all events from the Big Bang to the 31st century.
July 2001 The Enterprise is the Akira! In the wake of this biggest shock in my Trek life, I compile a malicious comment (that I tone down later) in which I coin the derogatory word "Akiraprise".
September 2001 Distressed about the events of 9/11, I write down a few thoughts. My complaint about the new Enterprise ("Akiraprise") as being too modern is printed in the Entertainment Weekly magazine.
October 2001 I begin posting Enterprise reviews, each typically one or two weeks after the episode has aired.
2002
March 2002 Launch of the EAS Fan Fiction section with stories submitted by visitors. The first special feature is the Star Trek Renegade series by J. Grey. EAS celebrates 1,000,000 visitors.
April 2002 EAS is going down because my webspace provider Strato terminates the contract with fabricated assertions against me. The website traffic at this time (the actual reason for Strato to get rid of me) is 50 megabytes per month. I find a temporary new home for the site thanks to generous help from Jak Crow of Werewolves.org who allows me to use his server.
May 2002 The Journal of Applied Treknology (JoAT), a new EAS spin-off, presents innovative ship design by fans.
July 2002 The Journal of Applied Treknology gains widespread recognition when it is featured as Pick of the Day at Yahoo and as Hot Site at USA Today.
September 2002 In September 2002 EAS moves to the server maintained by Tony Taylor where the site -meanwhile with significant technical enhancements- is still hosted today. The first script I install on the server is the Add-Your-Link feature, followed by the search engine.
December 2002 I install a Poll and a feedback script on the EAS server.
2003
March 2003 My announcement to suspend site updates because of the Iraq War entails a fierce debate in the EAS Guestbook.
June 2003 As my off-site guestbook has become a chatroom, I create a new one on the EAS server solely for site feedback.
2004
July 2004 The article about Kazon Ship Sizes is the first one in a long line that can be enhanced thanks to Jörg Hillebrand's screen caps and observations. The Starship Articles and the Investigations section benefit greatly from his work.
October 2004 I post a Con report of this year's Galileo 7 convention with Patrick Stewart.
November 2004 The text color at EAS is switched from white to light gray, and the episode reviews are in normal text to improve legibility.
2005
March 2005 As several gigabytes of the EAS transfer volume are wasted due to illegal hotlinks (image posts that are not recognizable as coming from the EAS server), I enforce a global hotlink protection through Apache .htaccess. Only the SCN and Flare Forums are entitled to hotlink to images at EAS. Later this month, the new submission form for the JoAT is functional. It was a colossal programming effort (especially since I had no idea of PHP before taking on the task), but it will save a lot of dull archiving and editing work in the future.
July 2005 When I notice that the spam rate is in excess of 90%, with drug and sex crap posted several times a day despite all my efforts of censoring, I protect the hopelessly spam-infested EAS Guestbook with a password.
October 2005 EAS features a Con report of this year's Galileo 7 convention with Jonathan Frakes.
November 2005 Canon Fodder is a new site in the EAS family, a place for theories that fix continuity issues or tie up loose ends in canon Star Trek.
2006
March 2006 All good things must come to an end. The old site design has become a bit boring, the navigation from sub-pages has been reported to me as being too complicated, and the concept of navigation headers and footers in each HTML page's code obstructs future updates and enhancements. This is why I have created version 2.0, taking advantage of SSI (server side includes) to have standardized headers that can be easily changed and of CSS (cascaded style sheets) for a limited but probably growing range of functions. The main objective is to create a modern layout with more navigation aids, but without inflating the code and without changing the traditional site structure too much. Also, the code for the actual content of each page (everything between the new header and footer) is to remain the same for the time being.
The site redesign may not look like a lot of work, but it required several time-consuming steps, beginning with many files that were moved to gather them in directories with the same theme (preferably belonging to the same of the eight sections). The next step was creating a parametrizable header and a footer for all pages, for which nearly 500 HTML documents and six scripts were hand-edited to insert the SSI code. The whole site was then re-uploaded step by step, in an order that would cause the fewest dead links at a time. Finally, it took me weeks of tweaking because not everywhere the layout looked quite as expected (it is possible for me to see the SSI headers as late as the page is already online). And there were annoying problems with the new CSS formats, because previously consistently bold links were sometimes bold and sometimes not (depending on where the classic HTML <b> tag was located relative to the <a> link). This is a consequence of the not yet complete transition to CSS which will have to wait until I have a software with thorough CSS support.
Considering recent trends in web design (tiny font sizes, fixed screen size layout, narrow columns), the current EAS web design still seems to be somewhat old-fashioned. And concerning the legibility of the text at still larger screen resolutions to come, it may not be kept as it is for a long time (although many other, more "modern" sites will hit the wall sooner). However, I have no intention to revise the basic layout again any time soon. Well, unless I find a method to automate the conversion to a more flexible page format, maybe even with two columns.
August 2006 The Fan Fiction gets a complete overhaul and most importantly a distinctive look (using CSS and SSI).
December 2006 I decide to include references from The Animated Series (TAS) to a limited extent, starting with the TAS Federation and alien starships.
2007
February 2007 The EAS site statistics register the visitor No. 10,000,000.
June 2007 I have been unnecessarily reluctant so far, but due to popular request I set up an RSS-based feed.
November 2007 The previously somewhat cluttered Treknology Encyclopedia receives a major overhaul and is extended to over 600 entries.
2008
January 2008 EAS celebrates its 10th anniversary. Also, I finally begin to review DS9 episodes.
February 2008 TOS-R: "The Ultimate Computer" shows a starbase that was originally designed by Masao Okazaki for the Starfleet Museum and later adopted for David Mack's Vanguard series.
November 2008 The first image of the redesigned Enterprise and the theatrical trailer are released, followed by a series of comments and other necessary updates at EAS.
2009
February 2009 My article Star Trek (2009): Reboot or Multiverse? stirs up a controversy in the fan community about how to assess the events in the upcoming movie.
April 2009 Shatner to Play Captain April in Upcoming Movie! I hardly ever had so much fun with my work than while preparing this April Fool's prank.
May 2009 The new movie "Star Trek (2009)" hits the theaters, and this leads to an all-time high in the visitor numbers of EAS, the top day being May 11th with 14067 visits! This is almost three times as many as on normal days over the past four years with generally decreasing figures.
In the wake of the new movie, I post a critical review, a list of inconsistencies and a comment on the alleged 725m long Enterprise behemoth among the first updates. But I underestimate the fervor of certain fans who promptly accuse me of picking a great movie apart and of ignoring perfectly fitting conjectural explanations. These people do not (want to) acknowledge that my treatment of "Star Trek (2009)" facts is in no way different than of previous Trek installments.
June 2009 After ten years of uninterrupted succession, the EAE Award is not given out on a monthly basis any longer. The reason is that too few Trek sites are left that would truly deserve this award with its long list of distinguished winners.
2010
March 2010 March 15, 2010 is the second worst day in the history of EAS as the site is being attacked and infected with malware. The attacker is located at IP 195.78.108.70 and has obviously cracked my FTP account. I find and eliminate the evil code very fast and change all passwords, but EAS remains blacklisted as an "attack site" for some time. Most likely it is just a random attack with automated tools from a hijacked server, rather than a deliberate attempt to harm EAS. Still I need to work hard to restore the reputation of my site. Unfortunately the scumbag who hacked my site will remain unscathed, just as 99.99% of all internet criminals. There is something fundamentally wrong with a system in which big companies hunt down teenies who share a few songs with a passion, while they do next to nothing against criminals who cause damage and grief on a large scale.
July 2010 EAS is on Twitter and Facebook now.
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