A bit more about our past and our present.

A lot of this was covered in the former Jux Entente Museum which is now legacy content, so here we go again.

In the beginning the Jux Entente was pure html that I edited by hand for each and every feature and news post. It worked great as the site began, but it was a pain in the ass as we grew. By the end of our first year Kenny “Kitty Vertigo” Knapke had created two generators that automatically added news posts and features, but Jux was still nothing more than html. There was no CSS. The generators “posted” things by editing the html files directory. This was Jux 1.x.

Jux Entente 2.0 was supposed to make the website modern; this was Kitty Vertigo’s grand new design. In almost every way the page was going to look identical to the old Jux, except now it was being done with CSS and semi-dynamtically generated pages. All Jux content was now stored in a MySQL database and whenever something new was added the entire page was regenerated from said database.

This third version of Jux is very important to us for several reasons. First, Jux 2.0 has had to be “repaired” several times over the past year as various parts broke down. This is harder than it should be because, as long-time readers of the site know, Kenny left not just the site but his friends behind in January of 2006. As he was leaving he stated in a private message that was archived in our forum database (the things you see in plaintext when you have to mess with MySQL…) that this site would never last without him.

Here we are over a year later. Not only is the Jux Entente still alive, but we have just transitioned to our most robust backend codebase ever. The version you see right now is designed mostly to give us feature parity with what came before, but more exciting things will appear soon. Not only that, but for the first time since 2002 Jux has an all-new layout and visual design.

Yes, feature production has gone down; no one can dispute that. However, it is also impossible to ignore that the majority of that is because I just don’t have the time to do the kinds of things I used to back in undergrad. The important thing is, we are not gone. We’re still posting snide comments. We’re still holding random pointless sporting events. And we’re not stopping anytime soon.