This project started in 1996 when I began to distribute the list of my own Marcus Miller records to various newsgroups and asked people to help me in putting together a complete discography.
Soon thereafter I got to know Jorgen Asklin and Mats Hagervik, two MM fans from Sweden. Jorgen, Mats, and I put together a little website, "The Marcus Miller Page", which still exists.
In spring 1997, I changed my ISP and got my own 2 MB of webspace where I assembled my own MM website. (Jorgen and Mats were busy with other things and didn't have enough time to update the website on a regular basis.) This was the birth of "A Marcus Miller Site" which at that time only consisted of the discography and some sound examples.
In summer 1997, I visited the "Northsea Jazz Festival" in The Hague to see "Legends". By chance, I met Marcus after the concert and talked to him about the two websites. Marcus was very interested and offered to answer fans' questions, and this is what he has been doing since then. He also contributes news about his current projects, his tour schedules, and other stuff.
In the first few months the Q&A process (which is now the Discussion Board) was maintained manually - I sent the questions to Marcus and typed them (and his replies) directly into the HTML files. When the website became well-known (through search engines and articles in some magazines) and the traffic increased, I had to program some CGI scripts that did the work for me.
In November 1997, I made a business trip to the United States and met Marcus in L.A. During this meeting we decided to move the website to its own domain "marcusmiller.com". Since then, Marcus has been paying for the domain name and the server rent.
In 1999, the tenth anniversary issue of "Bass Player Magazine" featured marcusmiller.com as one of the Top 10 Cool web sites of the '90s... :)
Thanks to the kindness of Marcus (who answers the website questions almost daily), this website became kind of semi-official and has now arrived at about 200,000 page views per month.
In July/August 2002, the site was completely re-done, graphically as well as technically. The new graphical design was done by Manfred Spiller while I rewrote all the technical underpinnings. The site is now based on a PostGreSQL database and served through a mixture of PHP and Perl. Almost all content is dynamically generated. The Javascript menu on the left side is a slightly modified version of the Milonic Popup DHTML Navigational menu. (Well, actually the JS code isn't really modified but generated on the fly on a page-to-page basis by the PHP code.)
