Site History

Shrub.com was started by Andrea Rubenstein in 1995 as “Shrubwomen’s Homepage.” In the beginning it was briefly hosted by “Geopages” (what is now “Geocities”), but soon joined a small Florida webdesign company called Mangonet. Then in 1997 the domain name “shrub.com” was registered.

There have been a few different incarnations of Shrub.com. It began as a small archive site which offered a few miscellaneous wav files. Soon after moving to Mangonet, however, Shrub.com became a way for Andrea and her friends to express themselves creatively. Staples of the Shrub.com pages included stories, drawings of various kinds, and other miscellaneous interests of the members.

But, in 1998 school began to cut into Andrea’s webdesign time and the “temporary” layout for Shrub.com became a permanent addition. Andrea even received an e-mail from someone wanting to use the site in an article about “dead” pages. The “updates” turned into nothing more than promises of a new Shrub.com.

Once Andrea went to University, however, a lot of things changed. One of which was the realization that the site could not be maintained in the old way. Another was Andrea’s introduction to PHP, which has been a great help with developing dynamic content. Since then the site’s look and features have gone through several changes in an effort to turn it into a community site. To further foster these goals Shrub was moved to a WordPress Multi-User platform running BuddyPress in 2010.

Currently the website serves as a hub for Andrea’s personal and professional projects.