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So you want to know why this site is here, how I came to make it, & why th heck it's called sffn.com when it's dedicated to IPTV's Sci-Fi SATURDAY Night programming.
Last things first. For many, many years Iowa Public Teleivision aired it's science fiction programming on Friday nights. When this site was created and the domain was purchased, the shows were on Friday nights and tere was no hint the shows would EVER move to Saturdays. In fact the move came as quite a big surprise, especially as it went from a rumored possibility to fact in a very short period of time. Many of the die hard SFFN fans are still a tad bitter about thier beloved shows moving to Saturdays but word from IPTV is that just as many poeple watch on Saturdays as they did on Fridays - which is great news as long as long as everyone keeps pledging and IPTV keeps running the shows!
To my dismay www.sfsn.com is already owned by the Southeastern Food Service Network, so I was forced to register sfsn.net and sfsn.org which are both active... However this website shall continue to be knows as www.sffn.com
So with that out of the way, lets go back in time to 1998 when the shows were still on Friday Night and find out how tis site came to be.
Where
is IPTVs official Sci-Fi Friday Night site??? that's the question
I asked myself one night as Dr. Who was going into its second episode.(back
when the shows were on Frida ights of course) Normally I "watched"
Blakes 7 while sitting at my computer anyway, but instead of mindless
random surfing I decided to see how IPTVs SFFN site looked. I spent
an hour looking for it... to no avail. Even IPTVs own web site didn't
have anything more than the standard program schedule.
I became very frustrated.
How could it be that there was no SFFN site?!?!? Why??? After all, of any group of viewers, I'd guess that SFFN watchers would probably be the most "wired" and most likely to visit websites. Deep within my caffeine filled soul, sometime around 3am that fateful Friday night(Saturday morning) I decided that if IPTV didn't have a site for SFFN, I would just have to make one myself!
So I sat & thought about it for a week & asked myself "what should be on the site, what can I actually put on it, and how do I get IPTV to accept it?" Weighty questions? Not that heavy man! I figured the best things to put on would be general sets of links for each program, since each show already has it's online following, why reinvent the wheel? But I realized that once the average surfer had explored those links & bookmarked their favorites, they wouldn't have much reason to come back. So I included the weekly schedule update & set up a little mailing list so anyone who wants to receive the latest updates to the place will get them! Then I figured I needed a "community builder" thus the Forum... unfortunately the Forum has started out very, very, slowly.
Ideally I also wanted to have a hotline to Mike Frisbee, and IPTV and a history of SFFN and other neat fun stuff, but realized I should just keep it simple to start... after all I still had to get IPTV to accept it & smaller pills are much easier to swallow.
Why I was so paranoid about IPTV I don't know... They really are a great bunch of people & once I got in touch with Anne, everything has been smooth sailing. However I would like to thank Siobahn Morgan who was my first outside contact about the site. I figured since she was such a big Dr Who fan with one of the most respected Who Webpages around, AND lived in Iowa I could come out of the blue and ask her some questions.
After
talking with IPTV, I went ahead & registered www.sffn.com - Then
was invited to spend a day at IPTV & got to meet the people actually
responsible for the show! Heck they even let me sit in on a recording
session!
Got to sit in on Anne & Mike hashing over the scripts for the show
and see the "bloopers" that won't (and mostly can't) be shown
on TV!
Also got to talk with the head web developer at IPTV bout their future plans for SFSN. Yes they would like to do a web page. Yes I'd like to help them & maybe even turn this site over to them someday. But for the time being, especially until IPTV feels the demand for it, this here's the place to be for SFSN on the web.
Of course times Change and the shows have moved to Saturday, IPTV now has it's own Sci-Fi Saturday Night site, but I don't think I'll be closing shop here any time soon ;) As mentioned above, I have registered www.sfsn.net and www.sfsn.org (sfsn.com was taken) though this website shall continue for the forseeable future as www.sffn.com