What is your name?
N-Wing
What is your quest?
For quite some time, I have stated my mission on my homenode: breaking everything (and then fixing it). I think I should update the second part to (and then trying to fix it).
(Overall, I think I have worked more on the programming side on E2 than the writing side.)
What is your favorite color?
green
And to steal somebody else's idea, my favorite theme is the default theme, formerly named root's default. It doesn't take much space and shows a tiny bit more node information than the other themes. I'm probably the only one that can stand it, though, so don't feel like you are missing something.
How did you discover Everything, and how did you become a noder?
After seeing these weird [?] marks, I decided to see just what they were for. (They led to a definition on Everything 1, which was hosted on a sub-domain of Blockstackers at the time.)
Around that time I was into the X-Wing and TIE Fighter flight simulator games, and started keeping track of the various ship statistics in a spreadsheet. Since Everything 1 had some technical stuff, I figured I would add in some more.
What do you see as the most significant changes that have happened to Everything over the past decade?
I think Everything 1 had a limit of 512 characters for a writeup, and only two people could write on a given topic. Since in the early years of E2 many people were from E1, short writeups were still common. Nowadays most pieces are several paragraphs or longer.
For years I have manually manipulated the URL to do things like go to a node with a given title (since the search was rather odd). I am still not used to the http://www.everything2.com/title/new+way+of+doing+things .
The messaging system did not exist in the original E2, either. As of today (November 13, 2009), there are over 1.8 million messages. (The various E2 staff usergroups sure talk a lot!)
What are your favorite writeups? Who are your favorite noders? Which ones do you miss the most?
The pretty long E2 HTML tags was fun to make. I made a program which read in a single file containing the entire contents (with a few special sequences) and it spit out the final document with index and individual chapters. I was also surprised when I hit the writeup-length limit; fortunately I was able to just drop the index from the main document and didn't have to worry about squishing other stuff.
I have seem some good, factual writeups. I tend to bookmark on interesting subjects, not necessarily a single writeup, but off the top of my head, m_turner and ariels have done some decent mathematical and technical writeups.
I feel a bit sad when somebody says they are leaving because their feelings were hurt.
What are your favorite and least favorite memories from E2's history?
I thought it was quite amusing when the random node function came up with Brian Eno half the time. It was claimed it was a bug, but since Brian Eno was nate's first writeup, I'm not so sure.
April Fools' Day has been crazy a few years. One thing I did was make writeups randomly display normally or reverse individual sections; I was impressed by somebody that tried to inform the site staff by creating a writeup and having the message forwards and backwards (so it would be readable no matter what). Please help us recover your nodes by linking their titles below by ariels also fooled a lot of people; not only did he have a regular expression that would make most people go "huh?", he asked to be sure it applied to your writeups to not make things harder for recovery.
What keeps you coming back?
The ability to break a live site. Also, not knowing what interesting piece will be written next.
What do you hope for E2's future?
It would be nice to be able to insert pretty equations, like by entering TeX and having the engine render it to a graphic for display. (Unfortunately, this involves multiple steps I am unfamiliar with, so somebody else would have to work on this.)
What does E2 mean to you?
A place of commerce and diplomacy ... er, OK, there is no commerce, but the Content Editors do need to be diplomatic at times, and some noders come from such a different background that they feel like aliens. (And some are from another country, so they are aliens.)
Is E2 a writing site, a community site, an online encyclopedia, or something else? What should it be?
Yes; there is room for all three of those. I think the [hard links] and random node function serve to tie dissimilar writing styles and content together.
Everything2 Decaversary Interviews
If you have questions or comments, please contact N-Wing or Jet-Poop.