NIHILISM ON THE PROWL!

THE UNACCEPTABLE FACE OF PUNK ROCK!!!
So here I was in the year 2000 on the net. I wanted to transmorph the Suffragette fanzine online but I soon
realised that the feminist newspaper I nicked the name off, would come back and haunt me. I found out the
name would confuse people who would get punk instead of women's rights, or vice versa. You needed an
individual moniker to stand out. So decided to bin the name and use a title that was totally original. It
naturally came from a closer source than previously imagined. I'd recently recorded a song called 'Gabriels
Hounds' for the Torcha Shed CDEP called 'Nihilism On The Prowl' which had the lyric "wanna be loud, loud
in sound, we are your nihilism on the prowl". I thought it made a great statement as well as a neat record title.
In retrospect its a bit of a mouthful, but totally original, and it suited the webzines presence and intention...
literally prowling the web with punk nihilism.
In the first few years I used about 6 FREE web site portals to house my webzine. Such as Angelfire, Homestead,
Tripod and finally Geocities. And each of these slumlords would all eventually kick me out unceremoniously
by making life hard like deleting pages if they overrun their precious boundaries or breaking hosting rules.
Most however declined free services after so long, or opted for a pay only service. In fact Geocities/Yahoo
discontinuing their FREE hosting service was the main reason Nihilism On The ProwI! eventually got silenced,
but they did at least give us 6 months warning, most of the others give none!
Building wise in those days there weren't any FREE blogs or such tools to house your views, interests or build
your website, you had to do it all yourself. The freebies were very restricted too and always had infuriating ads
splashed across the top or bottom of the page. I soon started eating up space by this stage. And was governed
by using totally FREE
website building tools coz
I was skint. And was of the
opinion websites should
be free. TRELLIX website
builder was my first
choice, which was very
primitive but I learnt the
ropes building on that
fucker. It's quite a
challenge learning from
scratch and with no HTML
expertise all I had was
ideas. All the experts were
saying you need HTML code
to build really good websites,
but that was bullshit I found
out later.
TRELLIX was so easy to use
and I was happy with that, as
the ideas could formularize
with quite a fast turnover.
Although you also had high
end range of tools like
Dreamweaver to tempt you
that were coming on the
market. These were always
way out my financial bracket
and very technical to use.
Inevitably as time crept on
TRELLIX proclaimed it was
gonna discontinue its FREE service in 2004 when it was brought out by someone. It was also getting pretty restricted. Which reminded
me of the fanzine space issue. Once I started growing in confidence and dare i say it expertise lol, I then discovered the Yahoo website
builder which was a step up from TRELLIX and you could download it for free. I found out later you could build as many pages as you
like on its GEOCITIES hosting. Reason being if you could sign in for numerous accounts as long as the name was different. So I built
numerous mini websites, you could then link them all together into one major portal. This really expanded my horizons, output and
creativity. In fact I was still using it's web builder till late 2021. There were some draw backs, I lost 90 pages (3 months from 1977
Calender) during the transition to Geo, which I could never get back, which was infuriating. Besides that setback it was pretty much
plain sailing and definitely the easiest and best one I've tried. In fact it's just like cut and paste and as an added bonus you can use it
offline too, which was a must in those days when you were on dial up arrrgghh.
Nihilism On The Prowl! was fast becoming a web zine archive odyssey, featuring over 500 plus pages which took up most of a decade
to create, but was great fun creating 'em. I enjoy the design aspect best, I see so many websites that look bland, you need a page to
jump out at you. All the pages are my designs inspired by the subject matter. The site was a big part of my life and responsible for
so much during these years. I was getting feedback from all corners of the globe, even got a few threats and put on guest lists. I ended
up living in America for four months, got married and divorced while there lol, got Stench and Torcha Shed record releases through
the site contacts, even had a tattoo with the logo, oh dear. I made some great mates and contacts via contributors and punks and even
met some neat birds too. I'd even got myself a job by now, but not quite through the site tee hee. As the song says Punk don't pay the bills
but its a labour of love I wouldn't be without. Nihilism On The Prowl! was getting up to 200 hits a day by this stage which was a lot for a
shoe string operated DIY punk website. And unlike a fanzine it was open 24/7 and was in glorious colour! I had no distro's to please, no
punk police peering over my shoulder and no photocopying prices to fork out every fortnight, in fact it was all I ever needed. It even came
second in a Punk website Top Ten published in Record Collector magazine MAY 2006 by those in the know. So I must've been doing
something right?
But as life would have it, you can only have so much of a good thing. I had a few health scares in the winter of 2009/10 with Liver and Heart problems (30 years of punk rock abuse can take some wear 'n' tear), but scraped through with some major life style changes. In some ways websites are no different, the ads the freebies foisted upon us were cringe worthy and grating, the constant space watching regime and shut downs didn't give you any security but you soldiered on. However within 3 years the website would be bought to its knees and endured its ultimate finale, when in October 2009 after nearly a decade of punk rock verbal my last FREEBIE had run its course. Billionaire Rupert Murdoch's buy out of Yahoo was the kiss of death. Instead of giving us more tools to play with, within 6 months the brakes were applied. Geocities announced that it would shut down the hosting service for good on October 26, 2009. There were at least 38 million user-built pages on GeoCities before it was shut down grrrr! It wasn't just NOTP that was going, I had built sites for Rubella Ballet and one for Antibodies, so it was a bummer telling them the websites were gonna shut. So where next?
Life without a punk site was unthinkable for me, its a calling, its a drug, its a way of life, its basically fuckin' fun. I'd tried all the FREE good webhosts, where you had a certain control over the layout but for the money the deal was shite. All what was left now, was the bland looking blogs which were way too uniform for my blank canvas liking. Even brilliant games like World Of Warcraft or the Fallout franchise which wasn't half as consuming or as entertaining as a window to the punk scene. On a plus point, I was now working, all be it part time. So maybe I could afford to buy my own web space? It had been 9 years since I last checked the prices. I decided to go legit by August 2010, shopped around for a while and found the best one for my requirements was Just Host, which was relatively cheap 'n' easy to use. It's webspace is unlimited which was my main requirment. The only dilemma now was I had to transfer and rebuild 800 plus pages onto Just Host's server. A process I'm still doing 12 years later ha! I also had to buy the name. It was a new era, a new start and by the summer of 2010 I decided on a new name. I wanted something shorter, something more memorable, something that summed up what this site is all about. It ain't strictly hardcore, it ain't pop punk and it certainly ain't new wave... it's Punk...Punk Rock!!! Believe me I tried, but that name has been taken, but Punk Rocker was free so I snapped it up for under a fiver and launched PUNK ROCKER onto the world.
Yours Sadistically
Peter Don't Care