by Theodore Wright.
In 1995, Tim Berners-Lee took the already existing simple old, text-based Internet and invented the World Wide Web. I began webmastery in the year 1996 and together, with a team ministry, we started the ministry of “dokimos”. My role was webmaster and handling of public communications.
The web ministry of “dokimos” began originally hosted by Netcom, then by Erols, then soon after went to the domain dokimos.org. We remained generally anonymous about our identities. However, now after 18 years, the website has completed its move to MaverickChristians.com with new team members who are not anonymous as dokimos was. The website dokimos.org is still active with content.
The purpose of this website was soul winning. The original text content of its key webpages have been preserved here at Maverick Christians in the “Pressurous Moments Storybook Collection”. The dokimos website did have much more content than that, though. The ministry of dokimos has been reopened to work together with MaverickChristians.com.
What was a webring?
The usual response I get to this question now is with the same question… “What WAS a webring?”.
This is what people used for communities on the Internet during the old Web 1.0 days before social networking came to rise. Webrings were communites which personal websites joined themselves to, linking by webring code. These were popular in the 20th century web. Yes, dokimos.org started small with ringmastery of Christian websites but began to be the host for more of these. Eventually dokimos ringmastered the most Christian webrings on the the web and also co-sponsored other Christian webrings run by others.
The ministry of dokimos also hosted a growing banner exchange, link exchange, and also gave out its own award called the “Proven Character award” to certain Christian websites. Gift images were also given out which have now been moved here to the Maverick Christians website on our page “Faith, grace, Christ, Scripture, glory to God ALONE!”. In order to promote the outreach of the gospel various methods of linking were employed.
What was a guestbook?
You might answer this, saying, “What do you mean, what WAS a guestbook? There still are guestbooks on the web now in 2014!”. To which I would say, “You’re right! There are many guestbooks on the web. But my question was not ‘What IS a guestbook?’ I asked ‘What WAS a guestbook?’“. Guestbooks on the web are not now what they used to be. There was not as much security on the World Wide Web now as there used to be. I will explain.
Back in the Web 1.0 days, and even now, if you wanted to gain more traffic for your website you could sign a guestbook on the web. If you wanted more visits back from them you could sign maybe 10 or 20, all having links back to your website. If you were more bold, you would sign maybe 100 guestbooks. Well, let me tell you that the ministry of dokimos signed a lot of guestbooks. Yes, a lot. About a quarter of a million. This did generate much web traffic from all kinds of people visiting dokimos.org. We received vast many automated thank you emails including a number of other friendly email replies. Nowadays, it is not so easy to sign as many guestbooks now that CAPTCHAs are generally used. Times have changed and there were not rules about this in the old days of the web.
What was a traffic magnet?
O.K., you will probably know what this one is. These still exist now but the rules can change. If you want to generate more traffic to your website having appealing content on it, that for whatever reasons people find it so, will do it. I tried various experiments of this, however, none of which generated such consistant legitimate traffic as the last webpage to reside of dokimos.org which is known famously under the name “ACCEPT JESUS, FOREVER FORGIVEN”. I placed this on a page on the back of dokimos.org with no other of my pages linking to it and unsubmitted to the search engines. How in the world did people find it? I don’t know but they did find it. It was generating more than 50% of the webtraffic of dokimos.org and still generates increasing traffic for MaverickChristians.com now with its link. This why this page still remains on dokimos.org while all of the other pages forward to MaverickChristians.com.
Conclusion
Changes happen in life and especially when doing ministry. See the Book of Acts if you need more examples of this. If you intend to do ministry throughout your life you will need to keep up with the changes. New opportunities arise to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. God at times will allow even certain calamities in life to open up certain other new opportunities for His people to share His word. However, are you in the right place ready for that? First off, make sure you have a real trusting faith in Jesus Christ, completely in Him, for your salvation. There on, press on for the mark of the high calling in Christ Jesus.
