Site History

      This website began its Internet life as www.frankfab.com. Although its first appearance was as The Fence, that wasn't the original plan. Initially, I thought I was doing a magazine format. That plan still appears as the vestigal Weird Magazine. Before I could finish this magazine, I realized even that format was too restrictive. Hence, the metaphor of the Fence.

      The idea was total freedom, everything changing, always under construction. This metaphor was the reason I chose frankfab as my domain name. Frank is not only me, but candid. Fab stands for fabrication (fabulous was not my intention). Fabrication for the construction metaphor, but also invention. And untrue—which neatly contradicts Frank, creating a nice ambiguity.

      Frankfab was fine for five years. Then, even this format (which I thought was unlimted) became constrictive. I was still free to do whatever I felt like doing. But now I felt the lack of a defined structure was unfair for my readership. (I stopped counting a long time ago at sixty-six countries.) Also frankfab was too vague. This was my site, so why not leefrank.com? (When I began, I never envisioned this site would be exclusively mine. When I began, I thought it was a magazine (Weird) open to other contributors. It didn't work out that way.)

Into the future . . .

      If I was to use a new domain name, I needed a new format. That lasted about a year and a half. While more complete than the Fence, it still didn't reveal the full dimensions of this website. Time for a redesign. (This one lasted about the same.) So here we are all these years later, and the Fence, Weird, and the vague and amorphous frankfab.com will soon be only memories, just early steps on the way towards the real future: Lee Frank's digital immortality.