PRE-O-L - 1997 to 1998

I've always been into reviews. And reference books. And giving things marks out of 5, 10 or 20. Early on in my CD collecting days, I got it in my head that I should start reviewing them. I could put them all in a database, and load it up onto this new 'internet' thingy. I hadn't actually SEEN the internet by 1997, so already I was thinking ahead. I wrote a few reviews in MS Word, working to an overly complex template, abandoned only very recently. None of those reviews are present in the current version.

Finally came Uni, and free, fast web access was plentiful. What we didn't get was webspace of our own. Hosting was very expensive in those days, books on HTML hard to get hold of in the library (it was a science college) and I didn't have a computer of my own to write it on. So initially, my own website came some way down my list of priorities.

October 1998 - EOL v1

I had contributed to a few other sites under my chosen name 'Jonny EOL'. It originally came from the Underworld song 'Cowgirl', specifically the line 'Eraser Of Love'. Why I picked that isn't to be discussed here. Suffice to say that despite dropping it briefly later that year, it returned and I never shook it off. Meanwhile, I had acquired an ageing 486 SX with Windows 95, MS Word, but no CD-ROM or HTML capability. Good enough for the occasional lab report but no more.

Finally, one evening in October 1998, following a tedious computing lab session, I signed up for a Geocities account. Threw together a website in MS Word, later converted it to a sane format using Claris Home Page (our department had a predominantly Mac lab - they never caught on with me). And so Jonny EOL's Home Page was born. Originally a single page, I later added a few others, including converted versions of my reviews. I kept to text-only with GIF backgrounds. It was ugly, but no more so than any other Geocities site in 1998. EOL-Audio, though it was not called that at the time, was born.

January 1999 - EOL v2

I borrowed a laptop during Christmas 98/99. Now able to work on one computer, I set about expanding my original site a bit. Use of Frontpage Express and a not-very-good graphics package from the cover of a magazine saw me expand the site a little. There were about 10 reviews on this version, including a few that  survived to the end of EOL v8 (Demanufacture by Fear Factory is, I believe, the earliest survivor, at least in terms of those that have not seen a substantial rewrite). The hacked AOL logo you see opposite seemed funny at the time.

No versions of EOL v1 or v2 survive. The hard drive they were held on died at the end of my second year at uni, and the floppy disk they were on fell to pieces shortly after. Some things are best forgotten, after all. The pressures of my 2nd year meant that no substantial work was done. Of course, I didn't really know what I was talking about half the time. Much of my music was acquired from the Music and Video Exchange in Notting Hill Gate (I lived round the corner from there at the time). Many fine examples of early synth-pop and EBM were acquired, as was a little goth-rock (much of it in vinyl form, cost then a real issue). But my writings were based around an incomplete understanding of the musical content.

November 1999 - EOL v3

Over the Summer of 1999, I once again borrowed a laptop, primarily to do some summer work I'd acquired. But with plenty of time on my hands, I set about getting my website the way I liked it. This time, I decided to feature one band on each HTML page. Every band. I didn't actually have internet access to help me piece the pages together (we didn't have it at home and my native Brentwood didn't have any public access points back then). So a lot of it was made up. I'd spent some time post-exams copy/pasting from various band websites, but whatever info I didn't have prior to the start of the holidays, I wasn't going to have until October!

Of course, the late 90s were an era of crap webdesign. Animated GIFs were beyond me, but frames certainly appealed. As did gaudy GIF backgrounds - a different one for every band! And the crowning glory - design the headings in MS Wordart! Throw in the Geocities pop-ups and we had one craptacular behemoth. It's still the oldest surviving version of this site, so I've posted a picture here for posterity. I e-mailed about 100 people advertising the launch.

Anyway, I kept on updating the site, eventually removing the worst of the crap backgrounds and irrelevant bands. I was also discovering more new music that previously. Most importantly, a band called 'Apoptygma Berzerk' began to feature. Rammstein, unknown except for 'Du Hast' on the Matrix Soundtrack, also crept in. Little did I know how I was set on a collision course with a certain music scene that would keep hold of me right through to this day. Anyway, I got my degree, but didn't enter full-time employment straight away, so there was time for another upgrade.

October 2000 - EOL v4

Towards the end of the life of EOL v3, I'd started to use the 'Eraser On-Line' term to refer to the site (but I'm buggered if I'm going public with the animated GIF I designed to celebrate the fact!). I'd also realised that frames sucked, as did gaudy GIF backgrounds. I thus chose to redesign the site with white text on black background, and a uniform look and feel for every section - textured forms of the curvy 'Alladin' TTF font dominated.

As you can see from the picture, the music section was still then only one of many parts (though obviously still the biggest). Bands such as VNV Nation and Diary of Dreams crept in around this time. I stripped out all the rubbish content and eventually relaunched the site in September 2000. Still on Geocities, but now looking and feeling a lot cleaner, more professional. It's the earliest version of the site I can read and not look back and cringe at. I happen to think the trimmed down design still seems quite fetching in this days of multi-column CSS-powered 'assault on the senses'.

September 2001 - EOL v5

I carried on updating the site throughout the next year. It only ever got a nominal amount of attention. Something was needed. Geocities ads and complex URLs weren't really befitting a site of this size. I thus sought out and purchased both a hosting package and an URL of my own. Around the same time, I'd been working at tiding the HTML on my existing pages, discovering how CSS could be used to unify design across pages. Eventually, EOL v5 was launched, the smallest change visibly between versions, but with a proper web host, URL and a much more efficient site under the bonnet.

Shortly before launch, however, a tech-friendly mate of mine spotted a nasty bug in the guestbook script I'd found lying around the internet. I'd made the mistake of using Perl, not the easiest language to get to grips with, and whilst pre-written scripts were everywhere, getting them to do what you wanted was a nightmare. The site went ahead, and a revised script was uploaded by January 2002. Finally I was free from 3rd party sites. This was the first version of the site to use the term 'EOL Audio' to refer to the music section.

All the other parts were stuffed into a 'Jonny EOL' section, a 'personal' part of the home page that I started to push into the background. Whilst I still wanted to cover other interests, I nethertheless had realised that websites get the most attention when they have one clear theme. Since writing reviews was my biggest thing, I focused on that.

You could say I focused too much on it - certainly some more work on graphic design would have helped.  My obsession with shiny Aladdin TTF fonts carried through the first half of the 00s, but otherwise most of my graphics were contrived and ill-concieved.  That header seemed like a good idea at the time, trying to be industrial and all that, but it just looks naff to my eyes nowadays.  You can also see my short-lived taste for certain music genres (I wonder what art-rock really referred to?).

November 2002 - EOL v6

One thing I'd always wanted to do was to make EOL database driven. It'd make updates easier, and finally allow me more flexibility with layout and suchlike. Only I couldn't work it out - my hosting package didn't come with MySQL as default and I couldn't get Apachce, PHP and MySQL to work on my own machine either. So instead I left that for v7, and instead set about another redesign, making the band profiles more biographical and less personal. I included brief discographies for each of them. One of my key issues with the internet was the poor quality of many band websites at the time, not helped by resources like All-Music Guide dealing with our scene very poorly. I wanted a goth-friendly version of AMG - unfortunately lack of technical skill stood in my way.

This rework took several months, June through to November. A design based round hazy, 4-pointed purple stars, inspired by a heading for EOL-Audio v5, taken to the max. The launch was anti-climatic, though. Personal difficulties clouded my mind on launch day. Nonetheless, the site began to gain attention. I got sent my first promos for review. 2003 and 2004 were to be busy years personally, hence no new version, but updates came regularly, once a month usually.

Even Mick Mercer picked up on what I was doing, even if he didn't like the design much. That and a lack of photos would work against me for some time.  Don't ask me where I got the purple stars'n'stripes idea from. They were used for everything from bullet points to marking reviews.

Anyway, 2005 came along, and the first five months of the year proved to be very busy ones personally. Nonetheless, come the end of May and I found myself with nothing in particular to do. I'd also sussed that the reason my site wasn't getting me anywhere in the scene was that the design wasn't good enough, and that the design (essentially HTML pages inserted into a common template) was clunky and inflexible. The final version of this site had 1,397 distinct files making it up! It was time to re-address the database issue.  Or to put it another way - My flatmate described this site as looking 'a bit Compuserve 96'. And thus prompted a 5-month redesign.

November 2005 - EOL v7

I'd addressed the database issue as far back as autumn 2001, where I had drafted a layout for a future version of the site in MS Access. In June 2005, I bought a 'Dummies' guide to MySQL and PHP and started working out how to transfer the site into one single database with scripts pulling information out and displaying it in HTML form. I also picked up an HTML book and worked out how to use CSS to control layout as well as design. I actually sussed out what I was doing really quickly, once I had the 'AMP' arcitechture on my local machine. I was producing my best HTML ever.

But of course, life outside wasn't easy. My brain had 'crashed' - my concentration was poor for several months and the outside world proved to be an unwelcome distraction. The 7/7 bombings didn't help, neither did a misguided (but well-intentioned) gym program and difficulties getting to grips with a new job. With several hundred band profiles to transfer into the database (and a few thousand releases!), I spent the best part of two months just getting this data across. Another two months saw me code the remainder of the site and get the database shipshape for launch.  I still think I rushed the graphics a bit, and the lack of alpha transparency support in Internet Explorer (still the dominant browsers at the time) resulted in the site looking duller than I was hoping.

I decided on Saturday November 5th as launch day. I was off work the week before, and I had fireworks, Slimelight and Black Celebration planned for the rest of the weekend as a celebration. It was also 3 years to the day since the launch of v6. Anyway, with much fanfare, I launched the site at around 1pm, grabbed my stuff and went down to watch Haringey Council blow lots of stuff up above Ally Pally. I didn't touch the site for about a month afterwards. (The game Vampire:Bloodlines took up much of my time instead). I didn't touch PHP code for nigh on one year, barring one very small insertion of a pre-written script to keep spam out of the guestbook. Put simply, EOL v7 knocked the stuffing out of me.

Anyway, the response was reasonable, people began picking up on the site more and I was able to pump in frequent updates each month. In March 2006, I finally acquired a camera, allowing me to take pictures of live shows (the most-demanded feature I hadn't previously been able to provide). I was getting sent a number of interesting promos to review (hello Yanni, Snake Skin, This Is Radio Silence!), although I hadn't made it onto anyone's 'list' yet. More worryingly, my to-do list was getting longer by the year, not shorter.

February 2007 - EOL v8

I'd worked obsessively on EOL-Audio v7 all through 2006.  I still wasn't THAT happy with the design, and I still didn't think I was getting enough recognition.  I still had to pay for virtually every gig I reviewed - and the only times I got guestlisted for were reasons unrelated to the site.  More importantly, the band profiles were getting unmanageable, especially as my PHP skills couldn't amount to creating an online editor.  Monthly updates were as good as it got.  There was little sign of the outside help promised either.

Things came to a head just after the mostly unremarkable Black Celebration 2006, where a couple of people kicked up a real fuss over what they believed to be an inconsistency in my criticsm.  Despite justifying it, they wouldn't back down and even some of their sycophantic followers joined in.  Whilst I shortly began work on a cut-down version of the site for v8, the heart wasn't in it after Christmas and I did nothing much once I returned to work.  I decided to place the site on hiatus once the new version was uploaded.  It WAS an improvement on the original, featuring auto-generated thumbnails and a more coherent structure for the reviews, but that was it. Certainly appearance-wise it wasn't much of an advancement.

A month later I entered into a relationship and whilst it wasn't so demanding that I had no time to work on the site, I was happier without it.  I NEARLY did a review of WGT 2007 as a kind of 'adieu', but nothing came of it.  A year and a half, two house moves, one computer and one relationship later, eraseronline.com finally expired.  I just had to let it die, forever.

December 2008 - Terminates Here v1

The terminateshere.co.uk address was purchased in September 2008, when eraseronline.com expired for good.  It's a real hassle changing all your e-mail addresses, but on the plus side I was pleased to leave behind bits of my life that I'd rather not have following me around.  I uploaded a selection of old EOL-Audio reviews to a Wordpress blog to ensure some of the best content stayed online.  Never got round to writing much more that that.  Only new stuff that got uploaded was my DJ sets.