Nobody is sure when the word was first used, however the first official use was in the yahoo email address, which was registered for the geocities web address. A slight controversy involves Jim’s father, who claims to have invented the word, though several years after the email address was created…

Having become bored of messing about with Visual Basic programming at school, Jim thought he would have a play with some website programming. The first attempt was rather dire, (as some would maintain they have all been) being created using Microsoft Publisher. Over the next few months content was added; including information about Jim and his friends at the time, aswell as a few pages regarding his interests, which included Star Trek, writing, and hating Pokémon (a section to which most time was devoted). This early JiMternet now only exists on a CD, lost somewhere in Jim’s house.

Arguably, the site moved up in the programming world, as Jim began experimenting with Microsoft FrontPage. What this site exactly contained has been forgotten, but it is thought to be much the same as the Publisher site, along with some school work related items and the Pluto Wars series.

During a rather dull IT lesson Jim discovered Macromedia DreamWeaver on the college network, along with its sister software Macromedia Flash. With this new tool, Jim’s imagination was captivated and every version of the JiMternet from then was based on these programmes. Sadly this minor technological revolution brought no new content to the site, only a proliferation of animated menus and miscellany.

In year 13, part of the ‘Upper 6th’ at King Charles I School, Mike (a friend of Ashley) wandered into registration one day with a t-shirt exemplary of his quirky randomness. On the front it read ‘Bull Sh*t’. This rather irked their form tutor, who in her meek way instructed Mike to visit the Head of 6th Form. A few minutes later Mike returned with an epic tale; it would seem she took the shirt in good heart, after he joked that the asterisk could have stood for many letters and that they were inferring just a single meaning from it. He cited ‘Bull Shot’, an example of his stance against the mistreatment of bulls in some countries. This is where Ashley came in and suggested it actually meant ‘Bull Sh-asterisk-t’, a small laugh was achieved, and all was almost forgotten. Later on in the day it cropped up in a conversation with Ashley’s eloquent friend Damien. In discussing the word they decided to take it upon themselves to give it a meaning with the goal of getting it into the vernacular.

The first mention of shastrix in any literature was in the exam period of 2003, where Damien used it in this A-Level English paper under its original definition of ‘a farcical situation’. As he obtained an ‘A’ on this paper, it would seem the word obviously didn’t cause much concern.

After Ashley’s previous hotmail account became inexplicably buggy, logging him out whenever Damien set his name to TTLoD (which it was most of the time) and chatted to him, he decided to swap to his new address.

During the Easter holidays Jim got a bit bored and decided to write an online diary to keep himself entertained, along with anyone from Rootes who could be bothered to read it.  Later in the holiday this feature was extended to other Rootes residents, who were invited to contribute via email.

On the 6th May Shastrix.com was born as a joint venture between Ashley and Damien. Without any official hosting the site was run off Ashley’s computer – but this didn’t matter too much as the site consisted only of a place holder which can be viewed on the archive page.

Jim decided to purchase the ‘jimter.net’ domain and have it forward to the original jimternet.com.

The kitten journals started out as Ashley’s blog under the persona of his cat, mirroring his day from the perspective of a feline.  However the journal soon became based purely on events in Kitten’s life and more recently some fictional elements have appeared.

The News section started out as a semi-blog which concentrated mostly on changes to the fledgling website.  It became progressively more oriented on site events until eventually being merged back into my blog.

Although only ever amassing three entries, the parodies section still remains one of the more creative parts of the site.  We recommend you check out the ‘No Meat Today’ which has been republished in Ashley’s blog.

The word ‘shastrix’ began to appear on Google for the first time in late 2004, this was partly due to references to the website, the definition on urbandictionary.com and through user accounts where Ashley had used the name.

At some point in January, the more detailed shastrix definition was deleted from urbandictionary.com. This seemed to be due to all submissions by ‘ASH’, an online alias used by multiple submitters being deleted.

On the 16th January the definition was re-added, this time under the alias Yridium, the only change to this was the being the addition of the word ‘random’ to definition c.

After much nagging, Jim provided Ashley with a specially adapted version of his MSN League software, which meant that the leagues (which already featured on JiMternet) now appeared on Shastrix.com.

It was first noticed that shastrix.com was the top search result on Google.

Because of the lack of content on both sites it was decided that shastrix.com would be hosted on JiMternet.com as a sub-domain.

Jim’s friend drew a picture of the two of them which made it’s way onto the images section of the site.  Over the next few months, several more would be added, until he became a regular fixture.

The photos section differed from the images section in that they were all shots taken by Ashley.  Images are presented in the form of an interactive desktop.

This was the start of Daffyd’s regular webcomic based on Jim’s Pluto Wars stories.  Pluto Wars was later abandoned, with Daffyd going his own way in developing the Team Nexus storyline.

Blogs have almost always featured on the Jimternet and Shastrix in one form or another, be it Easter or Summer Diaries, Kitten’s Journal, or the news section.  Eventually, Jim convinced Ashley to let him do a dedicated blogs section for the site, and after several weeks of hard work, they arrived.

The site has become dominated by the KilerFish section and the increasingly active blogs section.  Despite no new sections being added, extensive work has gone into expanding the functionality of the blogs and redesigning the KillerFish section. If you want to view some of the content of past incarnations of the Jimternet and Shastrix, you can always visit the archive; and for more recent website updates check on ASH's blog.

After some heavy development whilst Ash finished his disertation, Jim has put together a forums section for the site, which is intended mainly for use with the comics.

Following the addition of the Ninephase, Keenfans, and S.H.i.N.G. comics to the site, we decided to merge these sections into one managable monthly comics section, which introduced a front page with a news section at the top and four comics arranged in a square grid below. The Team Nexus comic was also updated to reflect changes to the feel of the site.

To celebrate Jim's birthday, he was made to redesign the comics page, which now lists the 5 most recent pages and five most recent comments for each comic.

After disappearing for several weeks the forums were reborn with a new simplified styling and some new features.

Since the last update, three new comics have arrived at Shastrix.com, MC Comic, AFMD, and The FAN. Yesterday a new version of the comics code was installed on Team Nexus for final testing before being rolled out to all the comics, and today the comics news page was updated with shadows and avatars.