A Hundred Issues of Sleaze

Another landmark achieved for The Sleaze - if we still ran the old numbered issue system, the most recently posted story would mark the beginning of our hundredth issue.  Which probably requires a degree of explanation for those who don't recall the earliest days of The Sleaze. Back when the site started, some sixteen years ago, the web was still young and nobody had any idea how publications should be run online - the current convention of sites being updated on a post by post basis wasn't universal, (the rise of the blog probably helped cement this convention).  Consequently, some of us initially tried to replicate the offline print conventions of sites being published as 'issues', entirely updated on a monthly basis, like a magazine. Whilst The Sleaze was originally monthly, it quickly moved to bi-monthly, as writing an entire issue's worth of stories and editorial content in one go was just too time consuming.  After a couple of years we finally adopted the blogging convention of publishing one article at a time.  However, the old system was still reflected in the numbering scheme for the stories and the publishing schedule for editorials (which still appear every other month). 

So, with 'Issue 99' having encompassed the stories published during February and March, (all of their suffix numbers in their URLs started '99', with the the third digit reflecting their place in the running order, although I sometimes get confused and assign the wrong running number), we must now be at 'Issue 100'.  Which is quite an achievement, considering that when we started, I thought that I'd be lucky to come up with enough material for ten issues.  Of course, The Sleaze has changed a lot since the first issue, most notably in having shifted from being a series of static pages to the current Wordpress-based site, but so has the web itself.  Back in April 2000 when the site first went live, there was no social media: no Twitter, no Facebook.  The mobile web didn't exist, connections were all dial up, speeds snail like compared to today and the idea of streaming audio or visual files online seemed a distant dream.  Nowadays, even my TV is internet connected and I regularly watch films  streamed from the web on it.  But some things never change:  The Sleaze still doesn't allow commenting on stories and makes emailing the editor as difficult as possible and I have no plans to change this.  Some traditions have to be adhered to...