About

Who is Dan Hancock?

I am. I'm a father to Veronica and Warren and husband to Lori. I'm a web designer by trade, though I'm soon to quit the trade to become a law student. I'm a toy collector by hobby, specifically of Transformers and comic book figures.

Where can I find you?

I am all over this crazy internet place. For example:

• Here's my profile on Facebook. I'm pretty sure you'll have to login and be my friend to see it.
• Here are my photos on Flickr.
• Here's my stream of consciousness on Twitter.
• I write and record podcasts at About Heroes.
• I occasionally sell toys and other stuff on eBay.
• Every once in a while, I'm on AIM as 'danehancock'.
• I'm on various Transformers message boards as 'Despotes'.

You can get a snapshot of my Flickr life here:

If you'd like to contact me, you can e-mail me at mail at shadowbot dot com.

Dragonballtoys.com and My First Website

I decided to make my first website in 1999. I had just been captured by Dragonball Z; the Saiyan Saga was airing on Cartoon Network and it was the coolest thing, short of Transformers, I had ever seen.

I'm a toy collector, and have been since I was too old to actually play with them. When I got hooked on Dragonball Z, I found that there were essentially no DBZ toys at US retail, so I started importing Japanese figures. But information on these figures was scarce, and what I did find online was mostly inaccurate, or at best incomplete. I could do better. The Dragonball Toy Island (Internet Archive link), which became Dragonballtoys.com (IA link), was my first real website.

I ran DBT independently for two years, and somehow in the process became the authority on Dragonball Z toys. This led to a regular column in Beckett's Dragonball Z Collector (my byline in a real, published, sold in stores everywhere magazine) as well as an arragement to provide DBZ content for Action Online's Figures.com.

Then

After I'd been running Dragonballtoys.com (IA link) for about two years, I finally started expanding. First, I created Shadowbot, which I thought was a wonderfully original name, but was already the name of an even-then defunct IRC bot (it's also now the name of Wikipedia's spam bot). I parlayed my experience with Dragonballtoys.com into legitimate employment as the 'webmaster' for the Lexington Public Library. I agreed to join the Action Online network, bringing Dragonballtoys.com under their umbrella, guaranteeing them ad space on the site in exchange for a few perks, including a nice traffic boost and free travel to toy shows. I even started another site for Action Online: SuperheroTimes was intended to emulate the NY Times in look and feel, but cover comic book toy related news (it's been taken quite a ways from my original vision since).

The arrangement with Action Online lasted another two years. Without going into detail, I broke off the relationship because I didn't think that the folks running it had their hearts in the right place. Since I had created SuperheroTimes for them, I simply found a replacement editor; however, I had to struggle as to what to do with Dragonballtoys.com. DBZ was over. Any attempts to post 'news' were just grasping at straws, and frankly I was just worn out. But I had a lot of sentimental attachment to the site. Eventually, I decided to simply sell the site to Action Online outright; unfortunately, they've not been able to find a new direction for it either, so now it sits, taking up space on their servers and in a domain registry somewhere. Alas.

Now

Now, I've entered my sixth year with Lexington Public Library. I have run Shadowbot, on and off, for as many years (though most of that content has been lost on purpose, you can sift through the Wayback Machine if you're really interested). I build websites freelance when I have time.

I don't have a lot of time, because my daughter Veronica was born in September of 2005. No joy of perfecting a CSS layout can compare with spending time with her and my wife (so I code after they go to bed).

That's my history in terms of my presence on the internet. I can tell you that I have no interest in 'running' a toy news site again, which is why, when I created About Heroes, the first thing I did was bring in a partner. My friend Omar (and the network of folks he's developed) provides the vast majority of content for the site, while I concentrate on the back end, making sure everything keeps running. I like it that way.

Many people ask, given my history, why I don't have a Transformers site. Sadly, I found that the running of Dragonballtoys.com sapped my interest for DBZ - when you're on top of everything, nothing is as much fun, and while I loved getting every toy made for free (samples are one of the best reasons to make a website), I basically stopped caring about them - the hunt is too big an element of the toy collecting hobby to eradicate it from the equation.

But I'll be happy to build a toy site for you, if you're interested. It seems I've got a bit of a knack for it.