About The Mantis-Eye Experiment
A Brief History Lesson
The Mantis-Eye Experiment is dedicated to covering any and all news related to the Adult Swim animated series The Venture Bros. I started the site in late 2004 after season one ended (after happening upon it during college during the tail end of season one) when I realized there were no sites related to the show with any real substance. Much like Futurama, The Simpsons or even Invader Zim, I felt it deserved having at least one site dedicated to providing as much information as possible on it. Thusly the Mantis-Eye Experiment was born.
The name 'The Mantis-Eye Experiment' doesn't reference anything in the show at all. I made it up because I wanted an original name that didn't borrow directly from the show but still attempted to carry the spirit of the show with it. The name itself doesn't really have any meaning beyond that, though I think it sounds pretty cool. As an added bonus site is also the first result in a Google search for 'mantis eye' which is funny if you're searching for info on praying mantis anatomy for some reason.
Staff
Mike Watson - Founder/Editor-In-Chief
For its entire history the site has had one staff member. Mike started the site back in 2004 as a college student and has continued to build it and contribute to it ever since.
Technology
On the technical side of things the site is and always has been entirely custom built. Originally the site used a completely custom CMS (content management system) which was essentially the first thing I ever wrote in PHP. Notably it was terrible in a number of ways that I won't go into, though it did work (mostly). After that I switched to a heavily modified version of an old blog CMS I created called 'Orb' (named years before the Venture Bros. episode of the same name was written). The site has also undergone a number major redesigns and had a lot of functionality added to it in the years it's existed.
The framework of the site, however, was always based on Orb. Even when it was revised to be faster and better the original CMS was still under there, waiting for someone to wake it. It was extremely limiting as a CMS goes and when I needed to do anything beyond writing a news update or episode capsule I needed to jump through all kinds of hoops make that happen. Initially the iteration prior to the one you are viewing right now was going to be the last one, but since seasons five and six were announced I decided that I couldn't live with that version of the site for another two seasons (which usually translates to something like four years in Venture Bros. time).
So this current version (which is the sixth distinct revision the site has undergone) is a complete rewrite of everything from the ground up. It's using a brand new custom CMS called, appropriately enough, Mantis-Eye, crafted with seven years of news, articles, episode capsules and more in mind. For the first time everything has a home and the site doesn't depend on having the same exact layout (with the same exact content) on every page.
In Conclusion
There's more that can be said but it's probably not overly interesting, so I'll let you be on your way. Thanks for reading, and thanks for paying the site a visit. I toot my own horn in this article a little, but I also should mention that the site simply could not exist without the people who visit it and have chosen to devote some portion of their online time to it. That really means a lot to me, and I certainly appreciate it. As always, if you have any suggestions or really anything you want to say feel free to drop me a line.
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