About the Band web site

Jan Høiberg, December 2012

Note: The Band web site is no longer active. It is now preserved on the web as an archive/museum, with no more updates.

The Band web site is located in the small town of Halden, in south-eastern Norway, where it currently occupies a few gigabytes of disc space on the (virtual) host machine theband.hiof.no, a state-of-the-art Dell PC running the Apache web server under the Linux operating system. All the equipment used for producing this web site is owned by the Faculty of Information Technology at Østfold University College, the workplace of Jan Høiberg, the maintainer and editor of the site.

From it's humble start in 1994, the Band web site has grown into what one of the reviewers of the pages called "the definitive resource on The Band on the World Wide Web". Although the site is not an official Band web site, it has been acknowledged and accepted by members of the Band and by their management and collaborators.

It all began in 1993, when I was looking for material on the Band in the musically oriented gopher and (the few) web servers on the net, and found practically nothing. As a long-time fan of the group (I was blown away by The Last Waltz in 1980, and probably still haven't fully recovered) I decided to do something about this. The first version of the pages in 1994 mainly consisted of what I could extract from my own record collection, including scans of beer-stained album covers and a few lyrics that often were quite different (to put it mildly) from what Robbie Robertson once had written.

To my surprise and delight I found that the pages attracted Band fans from all over the globe, and soon material started to flow in from collectors and die-hards. As the web exploded, I also found more and more stuff that could be ehm..liberated from e.g. CD shops and magazines for use on the Band site. Some of the things you will find here are rather, not to say incredibly, rare, like never-before published pictures, out-of-print obscure albums, and sound samples from tapes that only exist in very limited numbers. To read more about the main information sources for the site and the many helpers and contributors that have made this possible, see the page on credits and sources.

Up until the spring of 1997, the Band web site was written in strict HTML 2.0, with very little design elements and fancy graphics (one of the exceptions being the "little pink" home button.) The version you are looking at now is the result of a student project where a project group with three of our finest multimedia students redesigned the whole site, and added several new features. The emphasis is still on content and well-organized quality information, though, and we have tried to make the pages download fast and also be readable with older/textbased browsers.

If you find any errors in the pages, or want to contribute something, please don't hesitate to send us an e-mail. Happy browsing.

Jan Høiberg