Our History
Craig Hickman and Fritz Jung (of Witches' Voice) were chatting back and forth about theft on the Pagan net and other issues of Pagan web sites, When Craig stated (5/23/97 at 12:44pm)
"I'm thinking of starting a Wiccan/Pagan/Earth Webmaster Message Board where we can all share some vital ideas to help the new users on such sites as GEO Cities gain a better modality regarding good and acceptable HTML Practices... So many of those sites are just plain bad in their code: causing crashes to browsers, etc."
Soon more people were cc:ed to be included in the discussions of putting together this project. These people include, Whitewolf, Lhiannon (of Drak.net), Donal (of Brewich), Tina (of AvatarSearch), and Aislynn. When it grew to be about
seven members, Donal volunteered to set up a mailing list to discuss things so
they could all stop cc:ing each other, and the PWA list was born.
Names were tossed around. Pagan WebMasters Association was tossed
out after much argument because of it's male connotation. WebCrafter
was chosen to replace it because it was gender neutral. A small page wound up on Craig's site with
the intention of doing something grand later. For a time the PWA page resided on the
Witches' Voice, and then at DrakNetFree. Now we have our own domain.
In June of 2005 Gwen (wolfrose.com) decided it was time to pass on the care of The PWA. She asked Enyo (Wargoddess.net) and Inanna (Inannasgarden.com) to take over it's care. Enyo and Inanna also oversee Paganetwork and a number of other sites. The website hosting was moved to Inannasgarden.com for convenience.
The email list that Donal had started, remained at Brewitch until May 1999, when it was moved to the new domain. It remained there until March 2000 when it was moved to eGroups for ease of list management. The list was moved again in July of 2000 to Topica when eGroups announced a pending merger with Yahoo. The current list is on Yahoo and has been since June 2003.
The PWA was, and still is a collaborative effort utilizing the ideas of many people.
Part of the above was drawn from a post to the PWA-Admin list by Lhiannon on April 28, 1999. Additional information provided by Fritz (email archiver extraordinare) on February 29, 2000. For another prospective, read “Pagan Webmasters Association is a-borning” by Donal.
Some PWA Founders Links
• Craig Earthwisdom's Realms of Faërie
• Fritz The Witches' Voice
• Jen Drak.Net
• Donal The Brewers' Witch BBS
• Tina AvatarSearch
• Ariadne The Dreamroads Collective
