Summary: About the closure of the old FoxPop website.
About the closure of FoxPop
In April 2004 the FoxPop website closed. We have kept this page of closing thoughts and reminiscences.
Elisabeth Liddell (Editor and webmaster)
Due to continued health problems we have had to take the decision to close FoxPop. The workload is massive, and it is impinging on our health. As you may know, Mike had to retire from teaching on health grounds a couple of years ago and I preceded him down that road by quite a few years. As long as FoxPop was something that we enjoyed we could take the financial hit, and accept the workload/time involved. But continuing in what has become a full time job that not only doesn't pay anything but costs us - and also damages our health .... well maybe it's time to draw a line under the venture!
We decided that the best way was to simply stop, rather than letting the site dwindle and slide into decay due to disuse. And from the point of view of paying the maintenance bills, we can keep the shell in place for a while at minimum cost.
Final Thoughts – Farewell to FoxPop
Being the thoughts and reminiscences of the FoxPop Editorial Board, all of whom were involved with the website from the earliest days in 1998, when the new Fox 'pup' introduced itself to the Psion world.
Tom Stoneham:
When I first came across FoxPop, the internet was a spotty adolescent. Large numbers of major companies and government organizations did not have websites, and online purchasing often involved emailing credit card details! (I have a fond memory of reading some 'security advice' on a software website, giving details of how to disguise the instantly recognizable series of 16 digits which are your credit card number by including random letters and symbols and line breaks.)
In this environment Foxpop flourished as a loose grouping of individuals doing it for fun, spending their own money on ISPs, software, hardware etc., just because it was a hobby for them. We wanted to find out what was good and what was bad in the PDA world, and writing about it was a way of crystallizing our thoughts. It was a pleasure to receive an email which revealed that someone had read what we had written.
Two things have changed which explain why Foxpop cannot go on any longer: the internet is now primarily a market place, and the number of users is so vast that there is continual pressure for more and more content. It has always been the style of Foxpop to produce detailed, often lengthy, often comparative reviews, which is painstaking work and receives little thanks (let alone financial support) from the companies whose products we write about 'warts and all'.
Compare what we did with a site like PalmInfocenter, where one in three 'articles ' is just a cut and paste job on a press release (I know, I get the original press releases too). I could mention other popular websites where the content is as illiterate and shallow as a conversation in a bar; but that is exactly what is wanted, both by the commercial interests and the vast majority of readers. In an internet where sites like that are successful, Foxpop is unsustainable. Hopefully some of this non-commercial, amateurish approach will survive in the myriad smaller ventures which are being undertaken by the different members of the Foxpop Team.
Goodbye Foxpop, it has been fun, and more importantly, it has been worthwhile.
Palm Tungsten Weblog: http://blog.tomstoneham.com/
Frank Maddlone:
Five years. I bet that if each of us were to take stock of what has transpired in our individual lives during the past five years, we would all have memories that would cause our heads to bob and sway in disbelief. Five years. During this timeframe, the world faced the threat of a techno-apocalyptic future courtesy of Y2K. Communications shed a few more cables, and "wireless" finally found its rightful place in the world’s general lexicon. Desktops got faster and cheaper; laptops lost weight, and handheld devices spawned so many variants that the term "Pocket PC" became a tired cliché. Technology was used to see further into the stars, cruise the plains on Mars, and wreak havoc on humanity while in the hands of misguided zealots. And, amidst this cultural cacophony there was FoxPop – an insightful voice of reason in a world filled with technological powerhouses bent on capturing yet another piece of your desktop at the expense of your wallet – and sanity.
For those of us on the FoxPop Editorial Board, it’s been a period of enlightenment and dedication. Each of us grew within the scope of his or her personal endeavors, and found a way to share our thoughts and experiences with a global community eager for answers to their technical quandaries that were devoid of flash, techno babble, and liberal doses of salesmanship. We sought to educate without being preachy; to advise without being condescending. We even took some wonderful jabs at humor to remind us all that nothing in life is truly that serious beyond the love we share within our humanity.
Above all this hovered our leader and Grand Dame, Elisabeth Liddell – stalwart defender of the truth and master of the deadline. Along with her husband, Mike (aka patient supporter and protector of the English language and Elisabeth’s sanity), they brought intelligent foresights and common sense to the global portable technology community. Throughout the years, they helped to expand the knowledgebase of handheld devices (and all of their associated services) by gathering information from the trenches – from their personal experiences and from users, writers and technological enthusiasts whose wisdom was matched with a keen ability to translate their eagerness into useful knowledge. In that short span of time, FoxPop addressed everything from cases to causes; laptops to misguided logic. They did so with honor, respect, enthusiasm, and a strong desire to have the truth prevail. In today’s world, any one of these is worthy of mention and merit. Combined, they made FoxPop a unique and intelligent breath of fresh air that will be sorely missed.
But, as with all things in this world, it is time to move on. Both Elisabeth and Mike have dedicated a huge portion of their lives to this endeavor, and they’ve earned a well-deserved rest from the technological rat race. I cannot think of any two other people who are owed our thanks and gratitude for a job well done. They provided us with a forum where we could expound our ideas and vent our frustrations; where we could advise and admonish a public yearning to make sense of a technological wave gone terrible awry. I, for one, will always be grateful for the opportunities they and the entire FoxPop team gave to me as a humble writer and observer of life. As I move forward in my studies regarding ethics in technology, I will forever refer back to that point in time when there existed a group like FoxPop – a place where people wrote about what they loved and what they believed in. A place where reason was more than just a tagline – it was a right to be defended and proliferated.
Five years – a time well spent with a group so loved. Adios and travel safe to where your heart may take you.
Alan Barlow:
The last five years have
provided some of the best experiences of my life, and
some of the worst. Foxpop definitely comes in the former (mostly
).
Thank you to everyone on the Ed Board for their
support and to every one of our readers that took time to put finger to keyboard and write in to support
and congratulate - it is really appreciated. To
Elisabeth and Mike, thanks for being the mainstay of
the website and for keeping everything together. Good luck to everyone in the future.
John Woodthorpe:
Looking through my email archives, I think my first contact with Mike was a message some six or more years ago when he asked me about palmtops in schools. I don't have that exchange anymore because my email then was almost totally handled on my Psion via a CompuServe account. At the time, I was a regular in the CompuServe Psion forum (one of the most enjoyable electronic forums I've ever been involved with) and could hot-wire a modem into a hotel phone system in a matter of minutes to make contact with the outside world while travelling. I also wrote about palmtops for Archive magazine and maintained a web site in the web space CompuServe provided.
The launch of the Geofox One resulted in regular contact with Elisabeth as we talked by email and telephone about the merits of the machine, asked and answered questions of each other, and both maintained web sites. At the time, I had the larger site with more visitors and Elisabeth had the smaller one. How things changed as I found less and less time to maintain my own site, and Elisabeth persuaded more and more people to participate in FoxPop (or Geofox Populis to give it its full name) and write articles for the site.
In those days we enjoyed good relations with Geofox, and were creating new content almost daily as new applications and hardware appeared. For me, the event that made FoxPop was the one that could easily have ended it: the closure of Geofox themselves. I remember discussing the options with Elisabeth in long phone calls and emails, with us finally concluding that the best idea was to try keep the site going for as long as there were Geofox owners to support. The next change was to start to support a wider range of palmtops, and move to a monthly upload of articles instead of trying to keep up the pace of weekly uploads. I'm sure each of have our memories of the editorial whip being cracked ever so gently (but firmly) over us for articles each month. In the time that I've been involved with FoxPop, I've never met Elisabeth, although I managed an enjoyable evening in Minneapolis with Stan while I was travelling on business, and a never-to-be forgotten "Board Meeting" at Tom's Oxford College, attended by Tom, Laurie, Bob, Alan and Mike. I seem to remember that culminated in a bottle of Whisky being passed around in almost total darkness late at night in the College garden.
For me, FoxPop has been a group of electronic friends working together on things they enjoyed. As life has progressed for all of us, some of us have found it hard to keep up the pace of writing, and that's been especially true for me as I've become self-employed and had less and less free time to write for fun. Throughout that, Elisabeth has been a delight to work with, and I've certainly enjoyed that experience. Indeed the serious conclusion of our Oxford meeting was that we'd only work for Elisabeth because no-one else could make it such an enjoyable team to be part of. So, thanks for your cheerful guidance over the years, Elisabeth. FoxPop has been unique and you've made it great fun to be involved with.
Mike Liddell:
Almost six years ago I bought Elisabeth a present: a Geofox handheld computer. It seemed to offer the most wonderful combination of small size and weight with Internet connectivity and its own keyboard for text entry – and had the added advantage of the amazing range of 3rd party programs that was such a feature of the EPOC community. The size and weight factor was very important, because Elisabeth at that time (and this still applies today) had to spend most of her life on her bed because of the enervating and debilitating nature of her illness – and we had discovered that she was just not able to make full use of the desktop computer we had installed on a mobile workstation in her bedroom because there were too many times during too many days when she was not physically able to sit up and use it.
Internet connectivity was a vital component too. Many years ago Elisabeth published a series of articles in The Times Educational Supplement Scotland where she argued the case for the role of television in schools both as a major teaching aid and as a subject worthy of study in its own right (a series of articles which proved to be a major stimulus for what has become Media Studies in the Scottish curriculum, and which inadvertently became a contributory factor to her falling ill in the mid-80s, when she was not only a Senior Lecturer in Communication Studies at a leading Scottish college but was also one of three National Facilitators for Media Studies for the Scottish Office – a workload which was partly responsible for her ill health). One of the core arguments in those articles was the idea of television offering a window on the world for children – especially those who lived in relatively remote rural areas. The Internet is the supreme version of such a window, of course – and it offered Elisabeth (as so many others) a means of being involved in the world even though she was physically unable to leave the house.
I did not anticipate that the purchase of the Geofox would lead to the development of a site that attracted a worldwide readership of between 300000-500000 hits per month, gave us both a new set of friendships with an amazingly talented and diverse group of people, and gradually turned from a small hobby into something approaching a full-time job. FoxPop has been an exercise in serendipity.
But time passes and age creeps on – or, more accurately, time passes on and this creep ages – and in one of those little ironies that existence delights in FoxPop began out of Elisabeth’s health problems and has ended because of mine. It is becoming ever more problematic and difficult for me to maintain my small input into the site – and as Elisabeth already puts in some 40 hours per week maintaining the technical side of things (when she too should be resting) I have persuaded her that we have to stop when it is still a choice rather than a necessity to do so.
I know that other sites will soon fill any void left by our closure – both for regular readers, our remarkable band of contributors, and for ourselves. But life is a daily reminder of the need to let things go, and at least we have the satisfaction of knowing that FoxPop has ended on a high note – in the last week alone we have had offers of over twenty or so new articles!
So all that remains is for me to thank all those wonderful people who have granted us the privilege of their acquaintance cybernetically – and especially that small band that I have had the pleasure of shaking by the hand. John Woodthorpe writes eloquently elsewhere of a wonderful evening in Oxford where the conversation and the whisky flowed freely into the late hours and penumbral spaces of the Fellows’ Garden at Merton – and I would repeat the toast offered there to one and all of our readers and contributors: To Absent Friends.
Stan Robins:
I am proud to have been a part of Elisabeth and Mike’s FoxPop family from the start and honored to have been able to make a small contribution to the effort.
Renaissance Woman Elisabeth is no Frankenstein, but thanks to her focus, devotion, and vision, she created a beautiful monster. One of the most informative and entertaining technology sites anywhere, FoxPop grew rapidly and demanded to be fed – consuming Elisabeth’s time and resources to keep it nourished and groomed. Keeping the thing tamed seemed at times to require superhuman effort.
Handheld computing has come a long way from the device that inspired FoxPop – the Geofox, with its monochrome screen, intimidating email program, and inadequate web browser. (This is not to say that the Geofox was primitive. It used the Psion OS, a relatively sophisticated handheld operating system, with a solid, touchscreen-based graphic interface.)
Elisabeth, foremost among a pretty good-sized army of Psion OS devotees, saw the possibilities, and gave handheld computing one of its most articulate and visionary voices. Perhaps it wasn’t the site that was the monster – maybe it was the technology itself. Handhelds morphed from organizers and information managers to worldwide communications devices to all-purpose entertainment centers with games, still and video images, music, books, and motion pictures. There are web sites with sizeable staffs devoted to staying abreast of the trends, and they can barely keep up.
I wish I could have been the one to hit upon the silver bullet business plan, or been the Shadken between the site and an eccentric angel investor, or whatever it might have taken to keep it alive and well. As it was, my occasional contribution to the effort was nothing but a meager snack for Elisabeth’s creation, as the growth of the site seemed to approach the speed of light.
I hope that Elisabeth and Mike can now enjoy the freedom that closing the site offers. I value my friendship with them and hope to make good on the promise to myself to get to Scotland for a visit with them. It wouldn’t surprise me, however, to hear of them embarking on some new project before too long – something modest and manageable, at least at the beginning.
Elisabeth Liddell:
Well, it has been a real adventure and a labour of love! For over 5 years I've been developing FoxPop, and overseeing it as it has grown and changed from its beginnings as a single machine site about the Geofox One to a general magazine site covering many aspects of mobile computing. I've met a whole lot of fascinating people through the website, and made some real friends. I've learned a lot about running a website, and even more about handling viruses and hoax/spam email attacks!
It will
be a big wrench to say goodbye to it all, but you can still find me running our
personal website at
www.theliddells.com and at our web design site
www.scotiawebs.com . I'm not sure that I'll vanish
completely from writing about PDAs and my mobile computing experiences - one
thing that working on the internet has taught me is that things have a habit of
developing in new ways that you never thought of when you first started out! So
it may be goodbye to FoxPop as we have all known it over the last 5 years - but
it may not be a final goodbye!
