The original incarnation of the PMDA had this as what you could now call a ‘mission statement’.

I set out to create a page which is more than just a hobby page for the author - along with all those Me, my cat, my life-long love of Star Trek pages you see. I'm working on putting up reviews of my favourite novels as fast as I can re-read them to remind myself of what I thought was so good. There are links to other pages which you might find of interest and I we now have links to publisher's home pages. I'd also like to include contact details for people's favourite independent bookstores which sell lesbian detective fiction too in the not too distant future.

The Philippa Marlowe Detective Agency opened it’s doors at the turn of the millennium or thereabouts. Thanks to the wonders of the Wayback Machine I’ve been able to pull up a copy of the site as it looked in August 2000" when it was hosted on the freeservers site and having reminded myself of the url I’m amazed to find it was still there in the last form in which it existed in September 2001 when it moved to the current URL (note, my anti-virus found two JavaScript Trojans when I visited it so my advice would be to not go there, just enjoy the screenshot images from the wayback machine site).



Like all sites of it’s kind at the time, it gave you the space free of charge in return for putting a banner advert on top of the page. Remember this was before the advent of ‘the silos’ and if you wanted an online presence you used somewhere like Freeservers or GeoCities, learned a bit of HTML and away you went. But after a while a proper website beckoned, without adverts and with an identity which wasn’t at the whim of a hosting company. After a lot of thinking ‘riverquay’, which is the title of a novel by Janet McClellan somehow beckoned, I contacted the author who graciously allowed the use of the name. So hosted with ClaraHost, where it’s been ever since, the site launched in its current format - again the wayback machine can pull up a version from 2002.



After some prolonged periods of inactivity, due to other time pressures, the site crashed for reasons unknown without a full backup (lessons learned) and so rather than just try to rehash it out of various backup files it’s undergoing a complete rewrite and redesign (for it was quite dated as you can see from the screenshots, not having altered much in two decades).

I’m not sure that the intent has changed much since that original launch. The new version doesn’t have a links page, mainly because in these days of websites being replaced with people putting content onto one of the silo systems there doesn’t seem to be much to which one can link. These days most people seem to just create a group on Facebook for their content, which I think is a tragedy as much of the creativity which marked the Internet of the 90s and 00s has gone and nobody creates entire amateur websites devoted to “their cats or their life-long love of star trek anymore” (nice piece on the old days here.

I like to think the PMDA is a bit of a holdout in that regard…