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The Humble Beginnings of MarsNews.com
Back in February 1999, there were only a handful of sources for space news on the Internet, and none that specifically focused on Mars itself. As a member of the Mars Society's Internet Task Force, I often wondered if there was something that the organization could do to organize & present the few scraps of news about Mars that were scattered across the mainstream media news websites of the time, like Florida Today, the Houston Chronicle, the Mars Society's main website, and their New Mars journal. Occasionally, some of the more mainstream news outlets like CNN, MSNBC, ABCNews, CBS, and Fox News would post something about the Red Planet.
As a professional website designer, I felt that simply aggregating the news articles wasn't enough. The task required presentation of the information in a structured way and to provide contextual information, such as backgrounds of the various missions, and topics like terraforming and the potential for life on Mars.
As I began looking for a domain name to host the website, the most obvious choice presented itself for news about Mars... MarsNews.com! Amazingly, it was available, and I quickly locked up the domain by paying the registration fee.
Over the next two weeks, I designed and developed a Perl-based database application, which would be able to store news article links and information including the category they would be classified into. I had previously created similar web-based applications in the commercial world.
In addition to the technical aspects, I researched most of the current and planned missions to Mars, and created mission overview pages for each of them, adding some code to display the corresponding news articles by referencing the category they were classified into.
On March 5th 1999, the finished product (which I dubbed MarsNews 1.0) was ready for public consumption. I quickly posted messages to the Mars Society boards, as well as this message to Usenet.
The First Year
People all across the world greeted the new website with excitement and the traffic steadily increased over the new few weeks. The Mars Society leaders, including Dr. Robert Zubrin, were especially enthusiastic since this new website would increase the visibility of the organization. Zubrin highlighted it in a subsequent Special Bulletin sent to Society members worldwide. I quickly worked out a plan with the webmaster for the Mars Society's main site to include a news feed powered by MarsNews.com.
At the time, I was the President of the Puget Sound (Seattle, WA) chapter of the Mars Society, and my fellow chapter members were willing to do whatever they could to help out. I quickly enlisted my good friend Dustin Green (the chapter Vice President) to help maintain the daily news feed.
After only a couple of weeks, the site won its first award, being named the "Space Site of the Week" by the Space Careers website. Other awards were given over the next few months, culminating with a phone call from Popular Science Magazine. They had selected MarsNews.com to be one of their "Top 50 Best Science Websites" for the year, and only one of five sites in the Space Science category.
In August 1999, at the second annual conference for the Mars Society, I was given an "Outstanding Volunteer" award by Dr. Robert Zubrin and Maggie Zubrin, in part for my efforts to build & run MarsNews.com.
MarsNews.com Version 2.0
As the end of the year approached. I felt that the site had outgrown its original interface, and I began a project to streamline the site and make it more visually appealing. I was also mindful of the upcoming Mars Polar Lander mission, and remembered clearly how much Internet traffic NASA had received for the Mars Pathfinder mission, two years before.
The design I called Version 2.0 featured a narrower left-side navigation bar with links to every mission inline. The black "stars" background with white-background content areas and black text became the distinctive visual design for the site, which continues to the present day. Most of the backend software written for the first iteration remained unchanged, but many improvements were made in how the information was presented.
Polar Lander might have failed, but the new design was a smash hit, and we stuck with it over the next four years. While it was sometimes tedious to enter details of news articles into my simple web-form, and manually update the main page with FTP, we managed to succeed in doing so. As a result of the constant updates and occasional special coverage, our traffic steadily increased to around 600-1000 unique daily visitors/day.
Publishing and Broadcasting
Over the next couple of years, the content base for MarsNews.com grew and grew. In addition to the news articles that Dustin and I added to the database, we also offered a place for space science writers to publish their work.
Considering myself among them, I wrote articles about topics that I was interested in, including some investigative articles during a controversial time with the 2001 Mars Odyssey's data release. Some of my articles originally published on MarsNews.com later appeared on other online outlets and print journals.
Over time, the profile of the site was high enough that Dustin & I began appearing as guests on radio programs around the world. We both had always been interested in Mars, but only since maintaining MarsNews.com had our interest been so publicly recognized.
We also tried our hand at broadcasting ourselves, creating an Internet radio program called "Radio Free Mars" in cooperation with the Mars Society. While we no longer produce our portion of the program, the Mars Society's Canadian chapter has picked up the torch and is running strongly with their broadcasts.
The New MarsNews.com
To celebrate our fifth anniversity, we have completed a major redesign of MarsNews.com, and upgraded the site to new backend software, the award-winning Movable Type weblogging technology. The new design features faster load times, more mission information, and many new features. All content from the previous version of the site has been preserved, including our entire news article database. The NewsWire boasts articles going all the way back to 1996 on many topics of interest.
The NewsWire, our database of news articles, will continue to be the main feature of our site, but we will also continue to add other new content. As the Internet evolves, we will utilize new technologies in order to create additional improvements to the website.
Even before the new website launch, our traffic has steadily increased this year, due to the wildly successful Mars Exploration Rovers. We are currently receiving around 6,000-10,000 unique daily visitors, about ten times our average before the missions. We plan to make use of this increased interest in Mars by stepping up our coverage of ongoing missions. This new website design is only the beginning!
If you have any comments or suggestions, we would love to hear from you. Please let us know by contacting us.
After all, MarsNews.com is YOUR website.
Dustin Green is the news editor of MarsNews.com, maintaining the daily NewsWire. Green, also a longtime Mars activist, works as a mechanical engineer. He followed Burk as President of the Seattle, Washington chapter of The Mars Society and also served on the volunteer team for the Raven Human-Powered Airplane.
Posted by jburk at March 5, 2004 12:01 AM
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