It has been over 22 years since I registered flysoup.com and thought it would be a good time to share the origin story of the site’s name. So, why share this story now, over two decades later? Well, I recently decided to change web hosting providers, and in the process of reinstalling WordPress and importing my old content, I reread all my previous posts. While this blog now represents a snapshot in time for me, I keep it in place for nostalgic reasons. This trip down memory lane inspired me to finally tell the tale of how flysoup.com came to be.
The Soup That Started It All
In the early 2000’s, I worked at a software company on the east coast. While some individual restaurants offered delivery (like the local pizza place), there weren’t third-party food delivery services that would bring you options from different restaurants. To get variety or to discover new places, you had to drive to find those new spots yourself.
I love soup, and one of my favorites is Chicken Yat Gaw Mein. It’s basically chicken broth, chicken, vegetables and LOTS of lo mein noodles. It’s a great way to warm up, especially on a cold winter day. I found a strip mall several miles away from the office that had Chinese take-out. Sure enough, the restaurant had my favorite soup on the menu, so I ordered some and took it back to the office. It came in a 1 quart plastic container that’s not fully clear but has a whitish, see-through quality. I began visiting this restaurant frequently to get the soup I love, maybe once per week.
I was eating lunch in the office one day and my co-workers started to take notice. So much so that they wanted to try the soup as well. They loved it! Over time, more and more people wanted to try this hot, delicious soup. Chicken Yat Gaw Mein was a hit at the office!
The Birth of “Flysoup”
The pivotal moment was the time that I picked up about 8 quarts of Chicken Yat Gaw Mein for almost everyone in my office. It came in two large, heavy bags. I set them down on a desk, handing them out like gifts during the holiday season. Remember those plastic containers that were partially but not fully clear? While handing out one of the soups, one had a rather large, black shadow of a… “vegetable?” right on top. This dish didn’t contain mushrooms, but taking a closer look revealed a shape was unmistakable. Peeling back the lid revealed a large, and quite dead fly. It was almost comically large. It seemed impossible that it wasn’t noticed when the lid was placed on the soup. But there it was.
At that moment, the term “fly soup” was born. My other co-workers already eating briefly paused, wondering about the restaurant’s cleanliness and whether similar creatures might be doing the back stroke in their lunch as well. In the end though, only this one quart went uneaten while the rest were devoured. Oddly enough, this adventure didn’t stop us from going back to the restaurant, or as I like to think of it, “the scene of the crime.” Surely it was a fluke, but from that point forward, whenever someone wanted me to pick up Chicken Yat Gaw Mein, they instead asked for an order of “fly soup.”
Snatching the Domain: flysoup.com is Mine!
In the 2000s, many desirable .com domain names were still available but shorter names were already getting hard to come by. A 7-letter domain name “flysoup.com” couldn’t possibly be available, could it? On October 18, 2002 I got my answer when I entered “flysoup.com” into GoDaddy, hit return and waited for the longest 0.5 seconds of my life. Flysoup.com was available and I couldn’t believe it. I entered my payment details without hesitation and flysoup.com was suddenly mine.
Discovering a Previous Owner
While researching this post, I discovered that I wasn’t the first owner of flysoup.com. The Way Back Machine shows an “Under Construction” page in the site’s earliest entry on October 5, 1999.
This owner would never realize the flysoup dream because April 2, 2001 still showed the Under Construction page above. Within the next year, they let the domain go, making it available for purchase and I purchased it shortly after that. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with flysoup.com, so I set it to forward to another website I was already running. I wouldn’t be until around September 2006 that flysoup.com would have its own content.
The Early Days of flysoup.com
I created the homepage using Microsoft FrontPage, a program I was familiar with from my work as a webmaster at the east coast software company. I wanted the flysoup homepage to be a portal to different types of content. At first, I created a photo gallery using Coppermine as a way to show off photos I took on trips to family and friends. Although Flickr was already available by that time, I thought it would be cool to figure out how to run my own photo gallery. Shortly after, I installed WordPress and started the blogging on December 21, 2006.
Venturing into Blogging
I was really excited to get started and my first post “Welcome” was the start I needed. What would I write about? What would I share? Back then, social media was only in its early mainstream phase, so the best way to reach a world audience was with your own website and blog. I also wanted the experience, and to learn how to host different programs on my site. Hosting my website on Nearlyfreespeech.net seemed to offer limitless possibilities. I could manage my domain names, install my own version of Coppermine and WordPress or any other program I wanted. Doing this would satisfy a desire that started 16 years earlier with an Atari Computer.
My very first computer was the Atari 130XE. Atari was popular in the mid 80’s, along with Commodore, in the era before personal computers became mainstream. At that time, I used to log into BBS‘s and dreamed about running my own Atari BBS. Though I was too busy with school and didn’t have the time or money to get this set up. I still dreamed of creating content and interacting with others, so a blog seemed like the ideal way to achieve that.
A Nostalgic Look Back (Limited Posts and Hidden Content)
Although blogging was a goal of flysoup.com, it was something I did in my spare time. I was the boss of my site and I could put as much or as little time into it as I wanted. I picked the topics and wrote about what interested me at the time. I also learned about WordPress: How to set it up, how to pick a theme, how to format text, etc. I used to do a lot of this by hand as a webmaster at my job, so having tools that instead mostly focused on content was quite appealing. Looking at the flysoup.com blog now, only six entries were posted during its two years period of (not so) active blogging. In addition to the public posts, there were also 2 draft posts that were never fully completed and one post that was originally public which I later made private. I wrote that post before working at a company that partnered with the company I was writing about in my blog post. As a result, I thought it would be best to hide it. In the years since, both companies no longer exist so after 15 years, it’s available publicly once again.
The Domain’s Value Beyond the Website
Over the years, I was contacted a few times by people interested in purchasing the flysoup.com domain, for parody purposes. However, selling never appealed to me. Although you could argue that flysoup.com was mostly unchanged for almost 15-20 years and therefore was abandoned, the reality is that domain names are used for a lot more than websites. Back when Google Workspace was in its testing phase, it was called G Suite. They offered free accounts to anyone that wanted one. I wanted to be able to receive email through the Gmail UI but use my flysoup.com address. That’s exactly what G Suite offered (among other things), so I joined. Those who joined during that initial period were grandfathered in and continue to this day to enjoy all the benefits for free. That’s probably the most valuable part of flysoup.com these days and why I never would give up this domain.
And so, that’s the somewhat bizarre tale of how flysoup.com got its name. From a memorable, and slightly unsettling encounter with a fly in a quart of delicious soup, a domain name was born, eventually leading to this little corner of the internet. It’s funny to think how a simple lunch order over two decades ago could have such a lasting impact.
Thanks for joining me while I reminisce about this site. To celebrate, I created a new logo for flysoup.com.
