I generally don’t give out too much personal infomation on the intarweb. However, so that I am not constantly asked the same questions in the forums or by email, I figured I’d answer some Q&A that I generally receive:
Who are you?
I’m a 20-something-year-old dude with a website. I attended Edison HS (97) and UVA (02). I live with my cat and fiance in the DC area. I’ve maintained this website for almost 10 years, originally as Markus’ Jenk at markus.dorm.virginia.edu before moving to the current domain. The current site based on WordPress and multiple editors did not come into being until 2002.
Why do you have this site? What’s its purpose?
I really have no idea. It’s just something I’ve done for so long, that there’s never been a reason to get rid of it. Now that multiple people can contribute to the site, it’s more a meeting place for friends and a method of keeping in touch.
What are the technical specifics of your site? What kind of traffic do you receive?
I recently moved the site to dreamhost.com and run WordPress as the actual blog software with a mysql backend. The forums are based on phpbb and are hosted on another provider via generous support from the forums staff.
After disabling hot-linking, the site transfers about 150MB a day, with approximately 5,000 page requests and 1,000 unique hosts served daily. Unfortunately, most of that are myspace profiles, with pictures that used to be hot-linked, or people search Google Images for Shannon Elizabeth Playboy pictures (my top search term). The real audience here are personal friends.
What’s your policy on nudity?
Well, I would like to keep the front page safe for work, but I have no problem with linking to some juicy gay pr0n.
Why do you guys always talk about video games?
Because we’re fucking dorks.
What does WuMarkus mean?
It’s a combination of an earlier nickname (Markus) and the Wu-Tang Clan. It came out of a late night email to Danimal during my first year in college. I don’t really remember how the email went, but I decided that in order to sound tough, I should combine my nickname with the Wu-Tang Clan’s name in order to achieve maximum name potential. Similar to the Max Power Simpson’s episode.
What is the deal with your forums, and what is this DTV stuff all about?
The forums here are probably the weirdest on the Internet. Originally, a subdomain was hosted here called pso.wumarkus.com which had info on the Phantasy Star Online game for Dreamcast. It was managed by a friend. I setup some video game forums, and a few of those forums still exist.
Then DirecTV starting suing people and sending out extortion letters to people who had bought standard Smart Card readers/programmers in an effort to curb their rampant piracy. Afraid for my own safety, I offered a safe forum where people could discuss legal issues about their cases without fear of somebody posting a bunch of crap about hacking.
The video game site went down and the DTV stuff overtook everything. But there were some refugees that stayed around, so that’s why there are teenage kids and old dudes in the forums discussing god knows what.
Do you write all the posts?
No, this site has multiple editors (I use that term loosely), almost all of them friends or relatives. You can check the name of the poster under each entry. If you have something interesting to say, I have no problem letting others post, as well.
How can I contact you?
You can send an email or find me on most IM services as “wumarkus”.
Wait, you still didn’t answer another question I had!
Ask it in the comments below and I’ll incorporate it into this page.
