Reader Lillie Ammann wants to know why I named my site PoeWar. It is an excellent question and one I should have answered sooner.
The history of PoeWar goes back to the late eighties, when as a young pretentious college student I was reading Sun-Tsu’s The Art of War. The blurb on the back described him as a Warrior Poet. I liked that phrase so I turned it around to Poet Warrior. I also played a lot of video games back then, and in the eighties video games gave you six letters to record your name/handle when you got a high score. I started using POEWAR (they were all caps back then).
I started going online well before the Internet, back in the days of the BBS (Bulletin Board System). I needed a handle for these systems, so I stuck with PoeWar. It was unique, so I never had to worry about running into someone else with the same handle. This was especially important when AOL came along and eight million users were fighting for names. I didn’t have to be jhewittx456. I could just be PoeWar.
When I first got on the “real” internet back in 1993, It was through my local newspaper’s service, and my web site was part of their sub-domain. Naturally, they named it after my handle, so my original Internet address was http://www.azstarnet.com/~poewar. I started the Writer’s Resource Center that very same year, and maintained it on that site until 1999. In 1999 AzStarnet decided to get out of the service providing business, and I was forced to move my site. Because people already knew it by PoeWar, it made sense to me to make that my domain. If I had known a thing about Internet branding back then, I probably would have gone for a clear expository title. By the time I started thinking of this as a business though, I was already established at PoeWar.com. I continued to call it the Writer’s Resource Center, but the difference between the address and the name has always been an irritant. For this most recent redesign I decided that, warts and all, I was putting the name out there for everyone to see.
That is the story of PoeWar.
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