A couple of followers on Xanga quickly let me know a parent had brought them up on Lexx, or that my posts prompted them to go buy the series, which was pretty expensive and difficult to find back then. I didn't know anything yet at that time about site trackers and visibility, so I was a little surprised how quickly a few more Lexx fans found me and started asking me what I think about bits and pieces of the show.
I didn't really look for other Lexx fansites until the show was over and not coming back, which was about the time I started my first blog. I had combed the internet in the past for other shows and knew stuff like that existed, but I had no interest in fansites of my own until the show had been over for a couple of years. I had a little experience making personal pages in AOL hometown and had made a decently popular fan group before AOL stopped supporting those, but I had never considered housing and promoting my own material for a TV show. My first blog was named after a restaurant in Harrison, Arkansas called Grand Fortuna simply to amuse myself, but once Lexx fans started contacting me, I renamed it, I think in 2005, to GrandFortuna's League of 20,000 Planets and started writing Lexx material in earnest. I discovered site trackers and fell over at how many countries were visiting my blog regularly, and I learned to manipulate the numbers by toying with the fans. My most popular post on that blog before I made it all private some years later was a collection of screenshots of all the different characters tied up. I wasn't into porny material, but that definitely jacked my numbers.
I found forums before I found the big fansites. I had cut my teeth across so many other forums and groups before I ever got to Lexx. I was very experienced in swiping fans from main groups, hijacking and blazing new trails of glory until we were threatened with removal, basic rowdy fan raiding. But I was not prepared for Lexx. That fandom was like walking into a biker bar. It was like getting high on adrenaline rushes. I had a blast forging little bonds with a merry band of my own miscreants, giddying up a new thread or running off to play limerick games or poking around places I didn't belong just to see what would happen. For the most part, I was in heaven.
About that time was just before YouTube showed up, MySpace was grinding through vexing coding issues, and GeoCities was about to go down. We were still in the in-between stage of online fandom where fan-driven creation wasn't yet shoved out by wikis and episode recapping on monetized internet magazine groups. Fans still drove the internet back then. It was up to fans to fluff up the official dotcom programming and viewer scheduling. Fans were pirates on the high seas, forcing entertainment to keep up.
And now we have streaming because that was the only way to get ahead of the pirating. 😂
I naturally did everything wrong when I started fan blogging in 2005. I didn't source my material, didn't know about the courtesies of linking back, hadn't really paid much attention to that part of site building. I was wowed by other fans, particularly sites like Planet Lexx and Splarka's Lexx Linx (I'm so sad those went away), Cat's LexxLinx, Lexxplorations, The Lexx Domain, The Frey's Kai Comic Captions, AngleBacchae's Lexx screen caps, Maya's Michael McManus site, Trulyalyana and Helen's Lexx Light Zone, LexxZone, and LexxFan on angelfire. There were hundreds more, and I knew most of them by heart.
My own original fansite evolved over the years. I went private for a few years after the big fight in 2007, then came back out public just in time for the big Xanga migration, but this page is the gist of what I rebooted in my Lexx Index in 2012. I wound up buckling up and bracing for full salvage to blogger, which catapulted me headlong into organizing what I could under the domain Lexxperience.com, which has now been repointed to a landing page. I hooked up with Myke at SyfyDesigns.com early on (2013, I think), which kept me stable enough to handle so much stress during the salvage. In real life, both my daughters got pregnant within two months of each other, and by summer 2013 all the tiny person joy was a bit overwhelming. Lexxing became my distraction focus in between many very disruptive real life adventures.
I sat in on the lexx.com bids when the official TV show dotcom went up for auction years ago. I'm amazed that site has still not been developed. I think it went for somewhere around $8000.
Fans managed to rescue part of the official forum (not sure about all the previous content) before it was lost from the sale. I'm not sure how that happened, but it passed through a few hands before I volunteered to pay for the domain hosting. I kept it solvent for two to three years before I finally had a big talk with Myke about rescuing it completely. We worked for several months on a complete overhaul, since the site had been through so many updates and code jacks that it had finally been locked down in a sort of crash mode. We thought a lot of it might be lost, but it's all still there. My end of it was recreating and moving the domain and providing background history while Myke worked miracles on the code fixing and hosts on his server for tech assist. All this has been done at our own cost without asking for donations or funding. After that was done, I wound up on a sort of sabbatical from anything Lexx for a couple of years, barely touching base on my Facebook group or on my Lexxperience blog.
But that just spanned a bunch of years and that's not where I wanted to go so quickly right now.
