Dragonlance Nexus
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Type of site
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Fan website. |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Trampas Whiteman (formerly owned by Matt Haag) |
| Created by | Numerous fan contributors, with some parts written by published Dragonlance authors. |
| Website | dragonlancenexus.com |
| Alexa rank |
 3,446,142 (April 2014[update]) |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | No |
| Launched | January 2001 |
| Current status | Online |
The Dragonlance Nexus is a Dragonlance fansite that was created in 1996 as "Dragon Realm". The site was overhauled and a new name was given to it as the "Dragonlance Nexus". Beginning on November 28, 2005, the site began publishing articles written by established authors starting with an article on Jaymes Markham by the author Douglas Niles. Other authors have contributed to the Lexicon, such as Nancy Varian Berberick,Mary H. Herbert,Kevin T. Stein, and more recently Jean Rabe. Some of the articles found in the site have been published in the Dragonlance Campaign Setting by Sovereign Press. The site won the gold ENnie for best fan site on August 16, 2007 at Gen Con.
The Dragonlance Nexus traces its origins past 1996, but its current form was launched in January 2001.
The origin of the Nexus begins with a small site called "the Dragon's Realm." The site was started in the summer of 1996 as an experiment by long-time staff member Matt Haag aka Paladin to learn HTML and to talk about some of the AD&D Gold Box videogames he was playing at the time.
In late 1996, the Dragon's Realm joined the Forgotten Realms Webring. Paladin started one of the first Dragonlance Webrings to highlight his favorite campaign world. Unfortunately, the Dragon's Realm didn't really fit the Dragonlance mold, so a new site called "The Lost Citadel" was created. Both sites existed in the same 1 MB directory on Geocities. (To put that in perspective, the current version of the Nexus is over 90 times larger.) The Lost Citadel was invited to join an exclusive Dragonlance Webring called the 'Top 5% of Kender Sites,' run by the Sean MacDonald (aka Kipper Snifferdoo), keeper of the Kencyclopedia website.
The Lost Citadel continued to expand to cover other areas of Dragonlance material, beyond its traditional magic focus. Eventually, the site was spun off into a new site called "The World of Krynn," which went online in November 1997. The following month, the products and Fifth Age sections were added by Paladin, and the site moved off of GeoCities to a dedicated web host. Late the following year, the site's back end was upgraded to support the then-popular Netscape Communicator 4.0 to simplify some of the site's maintenance.
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