About the Blender / History

The Blender has been around since late 1993

It started when I realized that for some time I had been typing in random little bits of literature to share with friends via e-mail, and that 2/3 of it had something to do with romance.

I decided to make a collection, and make a homepage with a theme: The Blender of Love was born.

The trouble is that you can't just take other people's work and use it for no other reason then to make an interesting collection; that's why I decided the Blender of Love was going to be an Aesthetic Review; I would gather samples of works by different authors: enough so that you would know what the authors' work was all about and if it interested you, but not so much that you would have no reason to seek out the author's work.

As part of the Blender's original mission, I invited its readers to send "Something You Want To See On The Blender." Originally, I was thinking that I would receive works by established authors that had caught my readers' eye. But I tapped into a deeper need, the need for people to get their own feelings about romance on screen, in a public forum. So 'Heart on Sleeve' corner was created, a page for people to put their own love poems on the web.

Eventually, I claimed my own domain, alienbill.com, the Blender was claimed as an Alien Bill Production, and the site was moved from its old home at www.cs.tufts.edu. (Alien Bill, the green running eyeball has been my signature character since 1990.)

The site has received some nice publicity, getting mentions in USA Today, the LA Times, and a two paragraph review in The New Yorker. I've never extensively advertised it, but mean to start calling attention to more people who might be interested in romance and all of its artistic implications.

1997 saw many changes in the Blender. Heart-on-Sleeve corner became a monthly journal, as keeping all the material on one page was clearly getting out of hand. The process for submitting comments and material switched from e-mail to html/cgi forms, ensuring new stuff didn't get neglected because of the laziness of Kirk the Blender Keeper. Finally, in August Heart-on-Sleeve journal got folded into the new Blender of Love Digest, with all the familiar monthly content, and then some.

In April of 1998, the site moved from its home on www.alienbill.com to a domain of its own, loveblender.com.

In February of 2000 a new message board system was established.

In Late April/early May of 2001, a new system that allowed people to have user accounts on the site was setup.