About
The Author
T he author of Tailgrab dot Org(y) is a man of many interests and wishes he had more time to explore each of them in depth. However since one’s time on earth is finite (unless Aubrey de Grey has anything to say about it) he lacks sufficient time to do so. Some of these interests are included in the content of this website such as anime and the various sub-categories of fandom he purchases, music he listens to and the concerts he attends as well as cars and racing that occasionally get featured.
He chooses to go by the name “Aka” because it reflects both his evolution online as well as the anonymity one might presume they have on the Internet (but don’t). Despite it’s capitalization like a proper name he pronounces each letter individually “A.K.A.” when speaking of himself, though most everyone else reads it as a word/name. He finds it very odd when someone says it in person and it’s directed towards him instead of used in it’s usual manner “also known as”.
For more than a decade Aka has had a website of some kind where he showcased whatever interested him most at that time, blogging before the word became widespread, before he’d ever heard the term himself. Aka’s first site went ‘live’ in 1998 and was hosted by the then popular free hosting service called “XOOM”. The site was sadly dedicated to Evangelion and more sadly was full of those “Under Construction” gifs that were so happily used back then. Thankfully Aka realized his terrible mistake and removed the site from the Internet and existance before it could cause 2nd Impact, thus saving the world Shinji couldn’t.
After his previous creation Aka decided it would be much more interesting to host his own website on his own computer and his own connection. There was however one small teensie little issue with this idea. He was on dial-up Internet. Despite that he signed up with DynDNS and hosted a website off a spare Pentium 120 MHz machine and a second phoneline. This website was visited by next to no one, but despite that was updated fairly often with mundane livejournal-like entries about life as a nerdy teenager who watched as much anime as dial-up could get him.
While the website was ultimately a failure it taught Aka many of the lessons he would need to know in the future for running a self-managed website such as Tailgrab dot Org(y). Many of the really basic concepts such as static vs dynamic IPs, administering a server, domains and subdomains, and content management systems. Thanks to the foundation those lessons created Aka is able to manage his own linux server running Tailgrab dot Org(y) as well as various small projects running on other servers.
Through his websites Aka has had pictures published in an anime magazine from Hungary, pictures used without permission in a daily newspaper in the United Kingdom as well as featured as an example in photo contests without proper attribution of credit. All in all Aka is happy with the modest success some of his pictures have received and hopes to continue that trend in to the future.
The Site
OMGWebsite.com
OMGWebsite has been many things in the past, from phpBB2 forums to gallery, Aka has tried to find something worth running. However come February 2009 Aka found a purpose for OMGWebsite, complaining. Complaining about a purchase he’d recently made that did not live up to the expectations he had of the product. TAKI Corps terrible Horo figure. Aka was quite new to the figure scene, so new this was his first purchase and he had not done any research. He’d fallen in love with the Horo (ホロ) from Spice & Wolf, a wolf harvest deity, and through some Google searches came across said figure. The pictures were blurry and not very well produced however he dived in anyway blinded by lust. Aka was not happy with how this TAKI Corporation had mangled his beloved, thus born was OMGWebsite.
OMGWebsite received modest growth rising from a couple of hundred visits a month into the thousands and tens of thousands. As content was added more and more visitors arrived and commented. Through the use of aggregators like those on MyFigureCollection.Net and social networking sites like Twitter OMGWebsite’s growth accelerated much more dramatically. Despite the relatively low traffic OMGWebsite used ~17 GB of bandwidth each month at it’s peak, likely due to the large number of images on the site.
Tailgrab dot Org(y)
On the site’s second birthday (Feb 24, 2011) the OMGWebsite domain was retired and migrated to Tailgrab.org. Aka had been meaning to make this change for over a year but wasn’t sure how to approach it. After a hiatus from posting he decided that it was finally time to tackle this problem of switching domains and brand. Tailgrab.org had been the domain Aka originally wanted to use for the project but at the time it had been used for something else and it was passed over for OMGWebsite. A decision Aka has regretted ever since.
The name Tailgrab comes from the nickname given to a short video clip from the anime Utawarerumono that Aka looped for nearly a year back in it’s day. In it, an injured Hakuoro being supported by Eruru as they walk notices Eruru’s waging tail. Curious, he reaches down and caresses her tail wondering what it felt like. Naturally Eruru is quite surprised at being fondled so openly by this man she only just met makes the cutest screech ever heard in anime followed by what appears to be complete relief. And then she pushes him away violently.
My Rights vs Yours
Tailgrab dot Org(y) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. This means you’re licensed to use and remix the works produced by Aka on Tailgrab dot Org(y) (formerly OMGWebsite.com) freely for non-commercial use so long as you also allow others to do so with any derivative works you produce as well as attribute the original back to Aka at Tailgrab.org. If you would like to use any of the works featured on Tailgrab.org commercially, Aka has in the past granted license to do so. Aka can be contacted via aka [at] the website’s domain.
Aka on the Internet
Aka can also be found at the following websites.
