bkdelong

So, as many know, The Leaky Cauldron blog was started by Kevin C Murphy on July 5, 2000 thanks to encouragement of his friend Matt Kingston.

"7/5/00 - Per Matt's suggestion, I've gone ahead and (quickly) thrown together The Leaky Cauldron, a weblog dedicated to the further film and book adventures of Harry Potter. Check it out and, if you'd like to become a contributor, drop me a line."

Kevin was using Blogger at the time and his site was on Geocities before it moved to his own domain.

It took a little research once I heard news that Yahoo! had decided to kill the GeoCities site off to determine the first URL to The Leaky Cauldron, before I moved it over to my personal site at http://www.brain-stream.com and then to http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org (where it resides today -yes, you can blame me for the dashes and full words).

That URL was:

http://www.geocities.com/kevincmurphy/potterblog.html

An original placeholder of the site still exists at Kevin's domain forwarding people over to the main site.

So there's another piece of Potter Fandom History for those who didn't know.

I rarely talk about The Leaky Cauldron (TLC) on here or to my "non-fandom" friends but today we received an incredible plethora of news.

On the first anniversary of J.K. Rowling's cool, flash-based Web site we have received her "Fan Site Award". This wouldn't have been as meaningful as it truly is had she not written such a warm and endearing note to accompany it.

But the biggest news, by far, is that Melissa Anelli, (TLC's Editorial Director and a good friend), will be going to J.K. Rowling's home along with MuggleNet founder Emerson to be the first people to interview her after the book is released.

It makes me proud to see where TLC has gone since it was started back in 2000. It was a Geocities site using Blogger to publish news about the 4th Harry Potter book - Goblet of Fire - and was managed by Kevin C. Murphy with a host of other editors.

I have taken a backseat of late. Someone recently called me "Captain DeLong" but I explained I was more of a Harbourmaster or Ship's Engineer. I've been doing a lot of shepherding and behind-scenes idea work and concept development. Makes me think of the old times.

It was Columbus Day weekend in 2000 and Kirky & I were having a bit of an anniversary weekend in Provincetown on Cape Cod. Her parents let us borrow the first book on tape for the 3hr drive out. We were HOOKED. So much so that on 10/7/2000 we headed into town to Now Voyager Books and got Chamber of Secrets, Prisoner of Azkaban, & Goblet of Fire on tape. And that, as it is said, was the end of that.

I was addicted to Potter and for the next two months, went around to tons of Web sites looking for news. I finally got tired of having to find all the news myself and decided to start contributing to a site. I was really getting into Weblogs and Blogger so I looked for the most active Blogger-based Harry Potter site and came across "The Leaky Cauldron". On December 1, 2000, I emailed Kevin and asked if I could become a contributor.

Kevin immediately brought me aboard and 5 days later I had moved the site from Geocities to my own server and given it a domain name - the-leaky-cauldron.org. Then it just exploded from there.

I just found all my old email archives from those times and due to my interest in digital archiving and history, I will probably create as full a history of TLC as possible.

Thanks to all who have and continue to support me in such a wonderful, wonderful project and many, profound, words of gratitude to the staff who has continued to grow and make both The Leaky Cauldron and the rest of The Floo Network what it is today.