David Shipley

One of the GameSpy networks premier sites is Planet AvP. If your not used to the "In Your Face" style of PlanetAvP's site director, Please turn away now. If you are. . . I highly suggest checking out How to Report News an article recently done by Mr. Shipley. I have to admit, I fall into a few of the categories of the "How not to run a site" directory at www.newbieasswebdood.com .

                                                             Before and After

1.) How'd you get started in the WebMastering Game and/or who was your inspiration.

I started my first web site on a relatively unknown game called, "Starcraft". By a small company... what's-it's-name... oh, yeah. Blizzard. My site was one of the most popular, and I came up with the idea of merging it with the three other popular Starcraft sites; to become one huge site. Oh, wait. That's Starcraft.org's story. Nevermind.

Oh, right. The real story; I started a small Starcraft site called, "David's Barracks" on Xoom. Ten visitors a day, and five of those was me hitting reload four times. I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. If I wanted to become popular, I had to work for it.

Fast-forward two years - and two sites - I run PlanetAvP now. And I'm here to stay for a long time.

There isn't really any webmaster I admire. I envy a lot of people, though. "That lucky bastard gets to run PlanetHalf-Life". You get the idea.

2.) What's the most outrageous thing you ever did ON your site.

I did it last week; I said, "Wireplay can suck my salty balls".

EXCLUDE me, thats a given. . )

The gaming industry? I guess I admire John Carmack for his great programming skills. And I really admire Mark "Bastard" Surfas for creating GameSpy Industries. A gamer to a business man.

4.) What's the most annoying thing to deal with as a WebStud.

There's so many annoying things to mention. Here's the top four:

(1) The "I want a job ICQ people" - the most annoying people I've ever talked to. They contact me by ICQ, and say, "c8n 1 h8v4 a r0x0r j0b 8t y0r s1te?". They don't all use h8x0r language, but they all have crappy spelling and grammar (like me, and I hate myself). Since I announced on my site that I do need one new staff member, I can't say there's no positions available. So, I say submit your application. Two days later, I hired somebody else. He contacts me. "why d1dnt u h1re me??!?!?!?!!?11". Since I'm a much too nice of guy to tell the truth, I have to shovel in the BS. "Uh, uh, it's not just me who selects the winner. Blame Skull Reaver!". It goes on....

(2) HTML problems - even though I use a wysiwig editor - Macromedia Dreamweaver - half the time, I'm very good in HTML. The little "tricks" I know (ego boost there). But sometimes I just can't figure it out. For example, I had this 140 by 140 image positioned right next to this blockquoted, indexed, paragraph-seperated, text. For some reason, some of it dissapears on the right side of the screen. I spent three hours trying to figure out and why it do this. I finally fixed it, but God, it was tiring.

(3) GameSpy tech support people - these are the people I E-mail to set-up new staff members and to ask why certain things don't work. I usually ask 'em for the first reason.

Now, I don't like to critisize fellow workers, but they're kind of slow, and make a lot of mistakes. Now, I understand that they get a lot of E-mail, so it's a hard job. But what bugs me is they don't let me do it! I can understand how they should do the complicated CGI or ASP sort of things, but hey, I can set-up E-mail accounts.

(4) Staff members who think they're co-webmasters *wink*. That's all I'm gonna say.

5.) Does your WIFE still nag you to "Get off that damn computer before I break it" now that your a famous WebDood.

I think you mean l33t WebD00d, right? Course you do. Well, I don't have a wife (yet), but I get complaints from a certain redhead I know.

6.) Tips you can give Web-Jedi in training

Stay out of trouble. Seriously, though, I'm modest, and so much to be modest about, so I can't tell anything useful.

7.) Drink of Choice

Tea. No, I'm not British.

8.) Tunes of Choice

I pretty much like all types of music except rap, punk rock and techno crap. And I don't like the music that's coming out in the nineties. My home is the eighties. God the music at that time was great. And some pretty good weird ones like, "I wear my sunglasses at night" and "I can dance if I want to". [LoL] I had a great time.

9.) Babe of Choice

Babe the Pig?

10.) The real answer to no. #9 for the married guys who had to say their wives.

Tough.

( please refrain from the Tom Pabst's mom jokes. . . she's had a hard life. . . look at her son.)

What do you mean? If I say something horrible here, I *will* be held accountable for it! So, I'll just say, vote for John McCain! He'll do our country well.

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