iguanaland - the lizard's tale

~ a history of the hottest rag south of the virtual border

the lizard's tale:

I worked many years building and testing computers before I was inflicted with Sudden Onset Poetry in 1994. I bought a modem and with a free disk managed to connect with America Online's poetry boards in a matter of hours. It may have been the wrong place but it was the right time and I learned an incredible amount from the other poets. AOL's walled garden provided a clean interface but its heavy censorship drove many poets away.

"Wouldn't it be great if we could all meet somewhere in a bar once a month?"

This suggestion was made in 1995 by friend and fellow poet CyberClem.

I jumped ship and tried to make my own mark with such a web gathering place for poets to discuss their work. I had already started a rudimentary webpage and with my trusty HTML manual, planted the seeds of Fandango Virtual in 1994. Metamorphosis was the name of my poetry forum and workshop. There was no shortage of poets willing to join in and the zine followed shortly.

What to call this rag? CyberClem made a few suggestions, none of which seemed quite right. Then I chanced to read some comments on a poem he'd just written..., the title? Iguanaland!

With special thanks to him for the inspiration and for his gracious permission to use this title, I dedicated the first issue of iguanaland to CyberClem.

Looking back at the old issues is sometimes painful. Those early pages were ugly by today's standards; a constant battle formatting poetry in a way that could be interpreted by evolving browsers. At the beginning there was no simple ftp method and everything was case sensitive. Browsers changed hourly and were different for PCs and Macs (no smartphones yet). Frames and javascript complicated the situation. Things started looking a little better when I learned to use tables to corral the poetry within the page. Eventually even the tables (now being used to create design elements) were fighting with constantly emerging and evolving browsers.

The first Fandango Virtual page had a south of the border theme. The original flash screen used a wave in the title text (all lower case) surrounded by explanation points, the first one inverted. Code allowed each character to alternate position above, on, or below the line. Spaces were handled with even more code.

Iguanaland immediately laid claim to the distinction of "hottest poetry rag south of the virtual border". Each cover featured a picture of an iguana from the collection of Andy Biddle.

My favorite part of the cover design was selecting a uniquely memorable subtitle. The first two issues didn't have one and the third was was a prosaic "autumn edition (number three)". I wanted to avoid assigning dates or working from a rigid schedule and space was limited so I developed a system of changing the file names with each issue to give a semblance of flow and a timeless feel. The current issue would be named iguanas.htm and the previous issue woud be called last.htm. Later issues were named archive1.htm, etc. The names of the content files were sometimes named for content and sometimes the initials of the contributors. I have regretted those decisions more than once, but with the help of the Web Archives Wayback Machine I was able to recover most of the files.

Towards the end of 1996 I moved some of my files to geocities while STJ was in the process of changing servers. This allowed me to have a lot more control on the day to day operations. Fortuitously, one of the poets who joined the workshop eventually became my partner. In mid 1997 I resigned from my electronics day job in California and moved to Scotland. With my new partner, Jim Murdoch, we established a venture called Bonfire, a resource for writers of poetry and fiction in place of the old Metamorphosis forum. I hadn't originally planned to continue with iguanaland, but it seemed to have a mind of its own and the resurrection issue became the first issue published in the UK.

With this issue came a slightly new format adding two new features: pencilled in blue (comments from the editor) and lizard tracks, introducing iggy, our resident iguana.

The original fandango forum had adopted a real life iguana as a virtual mascot and the guests interacted with his fictional counterpart regularly. Pepe had his own website and we were informed that he had "moved to a greener place on February 17, 1997."

We missed hanging with Pepe so iggy lopez was created as our new mascot. He developed quite a literary persona and established himself as the proprietor of the fandango ~ where the creatively insane quench a virtual thirst ~ in Gator Springs where he also regularly contributed to the Gator Springs Gazette. The link on the iguanaland page led to his own column, iggy speaks. This featured his personal philosophy, iguana tracks (a key to his language), did you know? (links to informative science websites), iggy's web picks (most of which are now defunct), amigos (pictures of the iguanland lizards) and best bar snacks (linking back to the fandango forum).

Life changes in Scotland forced three more server changes. A few issues of iguanaland were published from Scotland servers, but without the workshop as a source it no longer seemed relevant. By this time I had written my first novel and started another online zine, Gator Springs Gazette. This zine covered poetry and fiction and many of the early iguanaland contributers were submitting there.

In 2006 Virgin Media and NTL merged and we lost the free website that had hosted Fandango Virtual. Since we had purchased the domain fvbooks.com to serve as the portal for our printed projects, we added archive links mentioning the online and print zines that were being retired as a result of health issues. I added a simple personal website (a bird on the head) with links to my own work.

In 2022 I decided to create a blog about my new hobby of origami. My old blogger domain was no longer allowing me to post photos from my flickr account, so I set up a new blog on Wordpress. I liked the look of things, so decided to transfer the fvbooks.com domain. Unfortunately, the transfer wasn't as straightforward as I hoped, so I redesigned fvbooks.com with the plan of including an archive sampling historical Fandango Virtual works since these web ventures were built from my own personal bricks.

In the course of reminiscing about geocities I discovered neocities inspiring me to recreate a version of the old Fandango Virtual using the same type of resources I had back then. I found one of my old flash screens that looked good and with a few minor design changes, this is where you are.

As part of the Fandango Virtual Archive, iggy has revived a version of his column at https://fandango-vee.bravesites.com/ called iggy's fandango. For the moment this includes iggy speaks, iguana tracks and a blog. I will never be able to recreate the rudimentary chat function we had back then, but this will put your heart in the right place.

I decided to create one final edition of iguanaland using an original iguana painting of my own for the cover. While I am using resources similar to what was available at the beginning, I was now faced with a wealth of different browsers and user devices. Now there are more users viewing media on smartphones and tablets than on personal computers. For this issue (and this page) I had to use a different method of presenting the title and content links. There were other surprises. Read my editorial in the final issue to find them.

This is a list of all the iguanaland issues published on both sides of the world:

The content for this issue was the work of 9 contributors printed in one continuous page after an introduction by the editor.

simple table with two columns linking separate pages with single poems for seven contributors.

simple table with two columns linking content for six contributors.

The third edition of iguanaland was the first identified as being produced by BYTE ONE in conjunction with the folks at STJ Publications. Credit was given to Andy Biddle's Iguana Page for the iguanas used as cover photos in most of the issues to follow.

The rest of the issues had similar front page structure with the title, an iguana picture and a linked table of contents with a discrete title page for each contibutor linking several separate pages for each poem (or art in some cases). Links at the bottom of the cover gave access to previous issues and the Fandango home page.

This included the second edition restyled as idiot's avant and winners from the metamorphosis poetry competitions.

This brings us to the current / final edition:

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