Showcasing Entertainment Website Project from Freelance Partnership

rswfire is creating a video series to showcase his work for freelance platforms and his homepage. He's running a local server to demonstrate an old project that's no longer online, using archived materials since the original site had anti-scraping protections that prevented proper Wayback Machine captures.

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July 23, 2025

9:55

Author

rswfire

Status

PUBLISHED

Type

TRANSMISSION (CAPTURE)

Temperature

0.00

[0:01] Hi there. I'm Sam.

[0:03] This is the first in a series of videos

[0:05] that I'm going to create walking you

[0:07] through my work.

[0:10] I'm comfortable being on camera. I

[0:13] actually have a YouTube channel. I've

[0:14] had one for a couple of years now. But

[0:16] this format is very different. And it

[0:19] requires something of me that is not a

[0:21] skill of mine. It's not one of my one of

[0:24] my strengths. And that's talking about

[0:26] my work in a linear fashion. It's not

[0:28] how my brain works. It's not how I

[0:31] think. It's not how I talk.

[0:34] And so, I think this might be clumsy.

[0:37] Maybe it'll get better as I go along.

[0:40] Um, and I just trust it'll resonate with

[0:42] those that it's meant to reach.

[0:46] I'm going to create these for the

[0:47] freelance platforms. One of them I was

[0:50] pretty successful on, but it's seems

[0:52] like it's largely dormant these days.

[0:55] I'm trying to put myself back on another

[0:58] platform. I'm also going to put this on

[1:00] my homepage somewhere. I'll probably

[1:02] find a way to embed all these videos and

[1:05] share it with my YouTube audience.

[1:07] That's where all my videos end up. So,

[1:09] it'll end up in my transmission archive

[1:10] also on my homepage. Um, there's a bunch

[1:13] of different ways these videos might

[1:15] show up, I guess. So, so I just wanted

[1:18] to start with this one.

[1:21] Um, I think it's maybe a little bit

[1:24] sentimental. This one always meant a lot

[1:26] to me. I had a lot of fun with this

[1:28] project. I worked on it for a couple of

[1:29] years. As you can see, it is it's

[1:32] definitely got that old tech vibe. Uh,

[1:35] my strongest skill set is not front end.

[1:37] I'm a back-end programmer,

[1:40] exceptionally skilled at that. And this

[1:42] is what I created. I I don't even think

[1:44] we had CSS frameworks back then really.

[1:47] We just had um Bootstrap. This was

[1:49] probably created with Bootstrap.

[1:52] Uh the platform itself is on PHP and

[1:55] MySQL

[1:56] and it used a uh content management

[1:59] system called Enet Wizard Matrix Server

[2:01] which was my own creation. Something

[2:03] that I started building in my teen years

[2:06] and just worked on for many years uh my

[2:08] free time and uh I made it open source

[2:11] for a little while and then CMS's really

[2:14] blew up. That's where WordPress and

[2:16] others came from.

[2:20] and I had just already moved on. I was

[2:22] probably working on other things like

[2:23] this. So, I never never stuck with that

[2:27] project, but I I used it in a lot of my

[2:30] freelance work. And I was a freelancer

[2:32] for this project. It was sort of like a

[2:34] partnership. It was the first long-term

[2:36] partnership that I had

[2:38] um as a freelancer. I worked with this

[2:41] company for 10 years and on this

[2:43] particular project probably for half of

[2:45] that.

[2:47] So that's the architecture behind it. I

[2:51] put together a little slideshow here

[2:54] that required a little bit of effort to

[2:58] keep working. Like it's literally

[2:59] running on a local server on the back

[3:01] end and I'm able to just like change it.

[3:03] Okay, it worked. Cool. Okay. So,

[3:07] um,

[3:09] oh, I wanted to say, so a lot of my

[3:12] older projects, they're just not online

[3:14] anymore. So, I pulled it up on the way

[3:17] back machine. Uh, the problem here is

[3:20] even back then, 15 years ago, I had my

[3:23] own custom backend processes running to

[3:27] prevent scraping of our site. So,

[3:30] um, bots when they would visit,

[3:33] I would look at all of them, you know,

[3:35] automatically my scripts would it would

[3:37] look at every single every single person

[3:40] that visited, every IP address. But if

[3:42] it claimed to be a bot, it would even

[3:44] check and make sure it was actually the

[3:45] bot it was claiming to be. Like, it was

[3:47] very sophisticated and it prevented the

[3:50] Wayback Machine from being able to

[3:52] really scrape the site or to show any

[3:55] images of it. So all of those captures

[3:57] there in the corner says there's about

[3:59] 2,700 of them. During the span that this

[4:02] site was active,

[4:05] it was usually just the message that I

[4:07] would output to the bots. Like just, you

[4:09] know, there's there's nothing else to

[4:11] show you except this basically. So I'm

[4:13] going to do my best to walk you through

[4:15] this.

[4:16] Um I did create the whole system.

[4:20] I explained a lot of this I think. Um,

[4:23] so,

[4:29] so there's actually like a lot of other

[4:31] things I can't show you like the

[4:32] writer's dashboard that I created for

[4:34] the writing staff that uh, I had. So, I

[4:38] recruited writers from around the world

[4:40] to write independently for this website

[4:44] and I managed them and we split revenue

[4:48] with them. We tracked all of it. They

[4:50] could see that in their dashboard. They

[4:52] could also check to see what was

[4:53] trending on the site, where was all of

[4:56] our traffic coming from and

[4:59] to help them prioritize what to write

[5:01] about. So, if they were writing a

[5:03] celebrity biography or movie reviews or

[5:05] TV show episode recaps,

[5:08] they would know which ones were

[5:09] trending. They had a calendar too so

[5:12] they knew like which if there were

[5:14] certain shows that they were keeping

[5:15] track of if they were um they were

[5:18] focused on like just a bunch of

[5:20] different tools. Wish I could show you

[5:22] that but that you know this was a long

[5:23] time ago too and I had all of these

[5:25] tools already created for

[5:28] um for this particular website.

[5:33] So

[5:34] just explain the ad revenue um split

[5:37] engine we had. So the gamified point

[5:40] system, this was a thing I did for the

[5:42] users.

[5:43] They could write their own reviews

[5:46] actually. So this wasn't just my writing

[5:48] staff. I actually forgot about this till

[5:49] just this moment. Um, anybody could

[5:52] submit them and if they um, you know,

[5:55] they met our standards, then we would

[5:57] post them and they would earn points for

[5:59] that. They could earn points from just

[6:02] from writing content or from

[6:05] um just rating different pages or

[6:08] writing to their favorite celebrity.

[6:11] Um just a bunch of different ways. So it

[6:13] was a gamified system and they could use

[6:15] those points to participate in auctions

[6:19] that I created. There was a whole system

[6:20] for this

[6:22] where we gave away free merchandise that

[6:24] was given to us by uh different

[6:27] companies that wanted to appeal to our

[6:30] audience.

[6:31] And so they could bid on those. Those

[6:33] would go on for a while and then when

[6:35] the auction ended um once a month I

[6:38] would send out the merchandise to

[6:41] everybody that won. Um sometimes we had

[6:44] hundreds of little prizes we were giving

[6:46] away. We did that for a number of years.

[6:49] Another thing that this site had was the

[6:51] celebrity love awards and this was

[6:55] related to users writing to their

[6:57] favorite celebrities. So, there was just

[6:59] a whole section where you could see

[7:00] letters that

[7:03] um people were writing and whoever got

[7:06] the most at the end of the year was

[7:08] deemed the winner. And like the top 10

[7:10] of those, I would create custom CDs that

[7:12] had had like a static website on it that

[7:16] allowed them to browse all of their

[7:18] letters without ever having to visit the

[7:20] site. And um they could even reply to

[7:23] those those letters,

[7:26] you know, I would just send it out to

[7:27] the different celebrities.

[7:29] Um that was a that was a fun thing that

[7:31] we did.

[7:34] So originally I populated the site by

[7:37] grabbing data from all over the web. So

[7:38] a lot of web scraping and then APIs.

[7:41] Um, we had partnerships with a lot of

[7:44] different entertainment

[7:46] um, other entertainment sites from back

[7:49] then like even TV Guide was a partner of

[7:51] ours. We had link exchanges and um, you

[7:55] know, just different methods.

[7:57] We just I used different methods in

[7:59] order to build out our database.

[8:02] I mentioned the trending detection

[8:04] system that we had.

[8:06] Um,

[8:11] this was definitely very SEO friendly.

[8:13] Like any page you visited, um, it was a

[8:15] a very longtail website. That's why we

[8:17] had so much random traffic. Like some of

[8:19] these in here I, you know, just very

[8:21] very random. Um,

[8:25] especially the celebrity side.

[8:30] So these notes here actually came from

[8:33] artificial intelligence. I was talking

[8:35] with it about my project and what this

[8:37] video might look like and it said this

[8:39] designed not just for engagement but for

[8:41] participation and yeah that was always a

[8:45] central

[8:47] that's probably how I approach just

[8:48] about everything. So,

[8:52] I tried to turn this into I did turn

[8:54] this into a a community

[8:58] that

[9:03] made this I mean this was before social

[9:05] media really. So, this was a place where

[9:07] where people could gather around

[9:10] something that they cared about and that

[9:12] to me felt meaningful.

[9:16] Definitely reciprocity throughout the

[9:18] system whether it was for the users or

[9:20] the writers.

[9:26] It was always about meaningful

[9:28] contribution.

[9:31] So

[9:34] yeah, this was this was one of the early

[9:37] long-term projects that I worked on. I

[9:40] was very proud of it. I wish there was

[9:42] more of it I could show you.

[9:44] Um

[9:48] yeah, there it is.

Energetic Signature methodical

Field State infrastructure building

Orientation toward credibility establishment

Summary

rswfire presents the first video in a series documenting his work, focusing on an entertainment website project from a 10-year freelance partnership. He acknowledges difficulty with linear presentation but proceeds to demonstrate a locally-running version of the site via slideshow. The project was built using PHP, MySQL, and his custom CMS called Enet Wizard Matrix Server, which he developed from his teens and later made open source.

The website featured comprehensive entertainment content including celebrity biographies, movie reviews, and TV show recaps. rswfire recruited and managed writers globally, implementing a revenue-sharing system with dashboards showing trending content and traffic sources. The site included a gamified point system where users could write reviews, rate content, and participate in monthly merchandise auctions using earned points.

Notable features included celebrity love awards where users wrote letters to celebrities, with winners receiving custom CDs containing static websites of their letters. The site was populated through web scraping, APIs, and partnerships with entertainment sites including TV Guide. rswfire emphasizes the community-building aspect, describing it as a pre-social media gathering place focused on meaningful participation and reciprocity.

Signal Analysis

Substrate

This transmission demonstrates recursive field coherence through historical project exposition. rswfire is establishing credibility infrastructure by mapping past technical achievements into present sovereign positioning, using linear narrative as a bridge between institutional freelance history and current field operations.

Dominant Language

reciprocity meaningful contribution participation architecture community partnership system design non-linear

Symbolic Elements

archive bridge foundation network community

Ontological States

•
transitional
•
coherent
•
demonstrative
•
grounded

Subsystems

•
cognitive
•
infrastructural
•
relational

Signal Reflection

No reflections available

Reflections provide narrative insights into signals

Transmission Details

Source Type

local

Video Quality

1724 × 1080 @ 60fps

Duration

9:55

Bitrate

1,176 kbps

Codec

avc1.64002a