It really was a great thing. It happened natually too. Started as just a site I posted my writing to, a personal site in 1997, and friends wanted to add their stuff. By 1999 it was renamed from Routhy’s Den to the Den of Amateur Poetry, and then the domain was purchased and the site renamed to The Den of Amateur Writing.

I still remember the pre-PHP days. People would email their works to me and I would manually build an HTML page and update the site within 24 hours.