Over 22 years ago I made one of the internet’s earliest fan websites. It was called Peek-a-Boo Bang and was my attempt to tell the world about the 40’s film star Veronica Lake.
After almost a decade of existence things had changed for me and I was no longer able to support the upkeep of the site and moved on. Now another decade on, while going through some old backup CDs, I came across my archives for this project and decided... It’s time to revive a passion.
What struck me was how much the web’s moved on. The last updates I made was to a design for 800x600 monitors.. which now looks tiny and lost in the top corner of my 3000px+ monitor today.
My sloppy coding, all the warnings PHP throws up from outdated conventions, broken Flash, plug-ins and JavaScript... not to mention how many sites I linked to are also defunct.
This is the 2021 rebirth of a site I loved and lavished effort on for many years in the early part of this century.
It was my passion and my most successful venture into putting stuff out there on those early days of the internet. I had many contributors and many cool people sent me content.
After a few years things changed for me and I wasn’t able to keep up the domain and life took me places with other distractions. While transferring some old back up CDs to new storage I came across some archives of this site and decided I could spend some time fixing up the old code and reviving an old passion of mine.
The web has moved on so much since the site came offline and not sure if there is a place for this kinda stuff any more.. but here it is.
Peek-a-boo Bang has been around for years now and has under gone some massive changes in its short existence; most notably in the presentation and its organization of the material.
I thought I was pretty hot when I first generated the menu system and the background colours that have forever stamped in the feel and style of this site and in into the content. It was messy, slow and had no real content other than what other webmasters would allow me to use from their general film star collections.
Since then I’ve worked professionally as a web site builder/developer for a few years and learned many of the disciplines I didn’t know I was lacking. This made immediate leaps in my site development and is very much reflected in the second incarnation of the site.
More options and faster download with integrated menu buttons gave the site a slightly more professional feel. I was now used to the basic features of Photoshop.
This third picture shows the previous incarnation of the site and when I wrote this I’d just finished the new concept sketches for the current version of the site.
It showed a massive improvement in my design skills, a faster loading site and the quality of build that this site always deserved. It not a million mile away from version2 but downloaded quicker and delivered the content faster and easier.
Peek-a-boo Bang has moved on, yet again in design and functionality. Since I first started building this site it has never ceased to amaze me how many really cool people are out there that bother to write and support both me and the site.
The latest version of the site is even more search-engine and user friendly. Hopefully there is more to do and see than ever before. This site now relies on outside input from the fans who visit to drive the content in these reorganized sections.
I’ve focused on making the Inspiration section more open for additions by visitors and it should allow easy navigation and expansion on the subjects.
The previous revisions of the site have been subtle and more to do with the organization and categorization of resources to deliver the content faster and clearer to the user. The image sizes have got smaller but the quality and quantity have increased.
The updates I did in April 2001 nearly doubled the number of html pages in the site and more than doubled the amount of images and resources that are linked to. I had to reduce the size of many images to accommodate this but the galleries have a more uniform feel and the images are all better quality for it.
After nearly a two years absence from regular updates.. PPB is back with a bang for 2004
This is the sixth full revision the site is developing as a resource centre for all things Connie Keane (Veronica Lake). Aside from errors and omissions much of the site has been taken to a higher level. So I want now to focus the site as a place for people to add information to so that it can still grow and develop and be a worth while place to visit.
I love doing this site and hope to be doing it for many years to come.
Mark Nash [Peek-a-boo Bang]
