A Eulogy for BrianMadden.com

I’ve unfortunately written many eulogies in my 25-year tech career, for industry friends & colleagues, for companies, and for products. Some were sweet, some sad, and some funny, but today’s is definitely the weirdest, because today I’m writing the eulogy for a piece of myself.

This past weekend, TechTarget turned off BrianMadden.com, and now entering that address into your browser simply and unceremoniously redirects you to their SearchVirtualDesktop website. 

TechTarget is the IT media company I sold BrianMadden.com to (along with the BriForum conference) in 2008. I continued to run BrianMadden.com as part of TechTarget through 2016, and the “other two guys” who ran the site with me, Gabe Knuth and Jack Madden, stayed on at TechTarget through 2018 and 2020, respectively. (Interestingly all three of us work together again at VMware today!)

When Jack left TechTarget this past April, we guessed that TechTarget wouldn't keep BrianMadden.com in its current form since the three main voices of that vendor-neutral site were now working at a vendor. I didn't expect the site to completely disappear though, and I feel like part of my history has vanished. Fourteen years of work, personality, reader comments, sweat, and heartburn now only exist in our collective memories.

Two Brians 

The story of BrianMadden.com is as much a story about me as it is about a website. I registered the brianmadden.com domain name back in the late nineties when I first started working in IT after reading a Fast Company article, “The Brand Called You,” by Tom Peters. (Fortunately, Fast Company has a different strategy for long tail content than TechTarget so that original 1997 Brand You article is still available.)

BrianMadden.com was essentially a personal static site for the first few years, including all the requisite tokens of the early web like made-up words, slightly awkward inspirational quotes, and plenty of jargon. (There was also quite a bit of Flash which thankfully did not make it into the collection of the Internet Archive.)

(Also I really, really liked Tom Peters.)

I didn’t start using BrianMadden.com for professional purposes until I wrote my first book, Citrix MetaFrame XP: Advanced Technical Design Guide, in 2001. At that point the site was just used to market the book. (Sample chapter, table of contents, etc.)

BrianMadden.com didn’t become an actively updated blog site until June 2003. That’s when I quit my job at HP and decided to become an independent consultant full-time. By then I had already written two books about Citrix, I had a third book (coauthored with Ron Oglesby, another guy now at VMware) coming out in the fall, and I was starting to get consulting requests from companies around the world since I was the guy who wrote the book.

In those days I thought my career would be consulting and book writing, with maybe the occasional speech here and there. (The concept of running a website as a business was unheard of in the IT enthusiast world at the time.) That May, when I was getting ready to leave HP, I read an article in the May 1, 2003 issue of Inc. magazine called “Blogging for Dollars,” where they explained that businesses were starting to use blogs and they weren’t just for angsty teens anymore. (Thankfully Inc. magazine also does not have the same long tail policy as TechTarget so you can also still read that original article too!)

Reading that led to my second (of three, in my life) “Jan Brady moment” where I thought, “Yeah! Yeah!? Yeah!!! I’m going to make a blog about thin client computing!”

Version 1

Seventeen(!) years ago, the way an individual person got a blog was to go to one of the blogging sites and set one up there, with each blog as a path off the main site. In other words, my blog would've been somebloghost.com/brianmadden, but I knew from the Brand You article that I needed my blog to be on BrianMadden.com. I don’t recall whether there were any OSS blog engines for Linux at the time, but since I only knew Windows and there weren’t any Windows blog hosting products out there, I decided to write my own. (Ah, to be 25 again!)

I had learned Dreamweaver UltraDev a few years earlier to make my ASPCostModel.com website. (A site which I showed to Citrix when they were in the ASP game, we talked about them licensing or buying, they went dark, and six months later boom! they came out with the ACE Cost Analyzer which looked pretty damn identical to what I showed them of mine. Life lessons all over the place!)

Anyway, my last gig at HP was speaking at Citrix iForum Australia, and I remember sitting on the plane all night home writing my blog software for Windows that would power the new BrianMadden.com thin client computing blog.

In those days, the blog wasn’t even on the home page. You had to click through to "thin client computing resources" to find it:

All the articles were full text on a single page! The first post I ever wrote, BTW, was about Tarantella buying New Moon. (I just DuckDuckGo'ed that to find the date. Found it in the search results, but clicking the link is a 404. Sigh.) I feel like I wrote that post at SFO on my layover from Sydney to Washington DC and I needed a post to test my blog software.

The blog database back then was a Microsoft Access .mdb file. To write a new post, I would compose it in my HTML editor, paste it into Access, then FTP the entire .mdb file to my site! I literally uploaded the entire site every time I added a post!

Over time I added more features. I remember hand-writing ASP 3.0 VBScript dirty code to add an RSS feed, based on reading the RSS XML spec. I eventually made each post its own page, and then as the blog became more popular, made the index of posts the actual home page of BrianMadden.com.

I remember vacationing in Maine later that summer in 2003. I was sitting by the lake with my laptop and 1xRTT card checking the site stats and I saw that I had over 100 pageviews the prior day. 100! In a single day?!? In our glory years a decade later we were doing 20k pages a day and spikes up over 50k a day weren’t unheard of, but that moment, sitting on that dock 17 years ago and hitting 100 will be with me forever.

Version 2

As my blogging and the site traffic grew, by the end of 2003 I knew I needed to re-engineer BrianMadden.com, since uploading an entire Access database for each post was ludicrous. Also I wanted to add features like user star ratings of articles, comments, popularity rankings, additional authors, user logins, etc. So I did that in early 2004 (while still consulting and writing posts and books), again all myself, using ASP 3.0 (but with a SQL server this time). At this point the site was still on a shared Windows host somewhere, and having access to IIS and SQL were just part of the packages they offered.

Here’s the new site from 2004: (There was a yellow menu bar which doesn’t show up since I got all these old screens from the Internet Archive and whatever JavaScript I used for the menus didn’t make it.)

That v2 platform ran the site into 2007. The photo below is from the last days of that platform over 3 years later. The menu color changed from yellow to blue, but it's basically the same site as 2004. (I added a support forum section somewhere in 2004/2005, but that was a third-party forum product that I purchased and integrated rather than wrote.)

Version 3

Around this time, “The Brian Madden Company” had grown. We had our business manager, Nicole, who’d started as a part-time employee in 2004, as well as Emily our BriForum event planner, plus Gabe and Jack as mentioned earlier.

We were doing so much as a company—the blog, the BriForum conferences, books (both ours and publishing books for others), training DVDs, live training classes, BriForum DVDs, consulting, speaking—I didn’t have time to keep writing the code for the website, so we decided to hire real developers to build us a custom site which looked like this when it was launched:

This version of BrianMadden.com was my favorite, in terms of ease of use for us as editors and writers. We ended up with six developers in Brazil (in the only Brian Madden Company office, wow that’s a story too!). They built the BrianMadden.com site, as well as the forum engine and the BriForum event site. It was all integrated in a slick way, but my fondest memories are the admin tools they built for us. We had a tool to schedule BriForum sessions, we had a tool to write articles, we had a tool to write books, we could reorder articles by dragging them; it was very, very awesome.

Version 4

In 2008, we had that financial “uh oh” meeting where we realized we need to simplify our business by cutting everything we didn't absolutely need. Unfortunately having an office and six software developers to build us a website, when our main business was being IT industry analysts, didn’t make sense. Also, the world of content management systems had really evolved since I started the company, and by 2008 we were able to buy a commercial package to do everything we needed for $50k capex versus paying something like $17k per month for our developers.

While going through the process of migrating from our bespoke platform to the new commercial one, I got a call from Jon Brown at TechTarget essentially letting me know they wanted to buy us. (Oh there’s a story too!) We ended up getting acquired by TechTarget in November 2008, just after we finished that migration. (TechTarget actually loaned us their SEO experts to help ensure we didn't screw up the URL mapping in the cut over.) Here’s what the site looked like in 2008 when TechTarget bought us:

One of my favorite things about working for someone else was that Gabe and I were no longer responsible for keeping the site alive. If we went down at 3am, no one called me. :)

In those days we ran physical servers. We had a pair of 1U web & database servers, a domain controller / Exchange server, a pair of switches, a pair of firewalls, a pair of load balancers, a Google Search Appliance, a NAS, an IP KVM and a few other little things. The main site for BrianMadden.com was literally half a rack (the other half was Blue Bell ice cream), and our failover site was another 3-4 Us from a different provider in a different part of the country. (One in Omaha, one in DC, since that’s where Gabe and I each lived.) I really think we were paying like $1500 just for the colo space!! Just for a website!!!

Here's the front view of the main rack. Raphael handled security.

And the rear view. Looking back I'm not totally embarrassed of the wiring for being done in my 20s.

Version 5

We stayed on that same commercial platform from 2008 all the way through 2016. Here’s the homepage the day before we moved the site over to TechTarget’s platform:

TechTarget had been wanting to migrate BrianMadden.com to their main platform almost since Day 1, but BrianMadden.com had a lot of features (the commenting engine, specifically) that were important to the site which TechTarget didn't offer at the time, so we sort of got a pass.

But by 2016, I was planning to leave TechTarget and BrianMadden.com, so they migrated the site to their platform where it lived until they killed it last week. Here's was the final homepage:

The Legacy

It probably says a lot about me that this eulogy has been a methodical technical tour of past websites rather than me sharing what BrianMadden.com meant to me. I'm sure part of that is because I'm a typical tech geek who's more comfortable with spreadsheets than feelings, but part too is that it's hard to give a eulogy for BrianMadden.com when I am BrianMadden.com.

Friends know how much I tried to separate "Brian" from "BrianMadden.com," but when you're young and excited and full of energy, it's hard to not to get your identity from your work. (Especially when you created it. It's not a job. It's your work! It's you!)

Years of experience and therapy later, I've managed to separate myself from my career. Selling BrianMadden.com to a big company and then working there for eight years helped. Leaving that company helped too. But the site was always there. Even after joining VMware a few years ago, I've still been telling people, "I don't work for BrianMadden.com anymore, but I still read them every day. And you should too!"

It was easy when Gabe and Jack were there. Heck, it was easy when Jack alone was there (along with Kyle Johnson, an editor Jack hired after Gabe left). But once Jack left, I knew that BrianMadden.com's future was unknown. I just didn't know that future would be as a relic from the past.

I am so proud of the work we did over the years at BrianMadden.com. I can say as someone in my 40s that I'm proud of all the initial hard work I did in my 20s! (Seriously, we talk about this a lot. If I teleported my current brain into my 25yo self, I would never be able to get back to where I am now because I could never work that hard for that long again.)

But BrianMadden.com's success was not based on me. It was based on the community that coalesced around it. That site truly drove the conversation of the industry. It was filled with smart articles and smart readers. The conversations in the comments were thoughtful joys to read, and people came away from the site smarter.

The impact was immeasurable. I can't count how many companies were formed, friendships, partnerships, and ventures made, and products created from conversations and connections around the site (and BriForum). We defined the direction of the industry. Everyone was there, every day, driving things forward.

And we had fun! The truck latch malfunction. BriForum Geek Out. (Hell.. BriForum!!! WHAT????) Gabe's butter knife. Getting vendors to send us food. All those dumb videos. The bobble heads. The April Fool's jokes. (Luflogix!) The bright hair colors!

The good news is mourning a website is more like losing a bar than losing a friend. All our friends are still here. We still work together. We still see each other (even if it's Zoom for now). But our gathering place, even though some of us stopped showing up years ago, is no longer there. And that feels weird.

(P.S. Yes we know who AppDetective are.)