Internet / Website

SunnySlutDotCom

a black and aqua SunnySlutDotCom banner from 2001 featuring the site's URL in a 50s inspired font and a photo of Sunny in pigtails in a bath tub.

My very 1st domain, for my 2nd personal site circa 2001, was SunnySlutDotCom, and the site itself was a surprise gift designed by my friend Nicole because I needed a site to launch my camgirl career and only knew how to build rudimentary websites on Angelfire.

SunnySlutDotCom, being the foundation of my camgirling, was, by design, supposed to be a NSFW site, but pretty soon after its initial launch, I registered SunnyCrittenden.com and started maintaining two websites: one for camming that not only had my tits, but also links to other people’s tits; and a vanilla one that was suitable to show people at my college that had my advertising portfolio on it. The layout for the NSFW SunnySlutDotCom initially had a black background, and the public-facing SunnyCrittenden.com had a white background, trying to be as obvious as possible that the two sites were different.

SunnySlutDotCom banner circa 2003

My favourite, and the final serious SunnySlutDotCom website layout I designed, was in October of 2003, and was supposed to be themed like a fancy, wild wild west whorehouse/saloon. This was the splash page:

I was so proud of the splash image, because you have to understand that you couldn’t simply google “aged parchment” and get a base image to work from, you had to create everything from scratch and, in my case, in a pirated copy of Photoshop on top of that. I remember agonizing over the background, trying to make it look like aged, burnt parchment, with next to no previous instruction on how to use Photoshop, and being surprised at what I made. I was proud of my use of Recife fonts because as far as I knew at the time, no other camgirls were using them.

The menu was a sliced image map, so that when you clicked on each section of the jpeg, it linked to something external, or a new page on the site, and when you hovered on any of them with a mouse, there was text that popped up. I was really proud of figuring that out at the time because I think it was either a new capability within HTML, or was just hard to do, I forget.

To explain, the “GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!” part of the image was my CamwhoresDotCom affiliate link, where I’d earn royalties when people subscribed to the site. The “Gift Shop” part linked to MerchBitchDotCom where people could buy my art and Pussy Pucker Pots handmade vegan lip balm. “Don’t forget to tip your server” pointed to a “Wishes” page with links to my Amazon and Victoria’s Secret wishlists, as well as random things I wished I had or wished would just appear on my doorstep (some of which did). And so on.

Food For Thought” linked to a page where I listed charities that were important to me both because they were important to me, but also because the adult industry lost one of its key payment processors, Globill, which meant that all of the affiliate porn and cam sites I advertised on my site normally, were down while they scrambled to find alternatives (or they disappeared overnight). I figured instead of just having no page on my site to generate $0, I might as well have at least one page that could karmically raise funds for someone else.

As a result, during the years my mom, Madison and I participated in the Superwalk For Parkinsons, the people who followed me on the internet gave the bulk of the donations, and over the years, I received several forwarded e-mails from folks, that said they’d donated to The Endometriosis Association, which was especially near and dear to my heart. Due to the initial positive response to the charities page in 2003, having one on my site became a permanent fixture until I switched to WordPress until at least the early 2010s.

Only really selfish, vapid camgirls didn’t link to other camgirls via a “Links” section on their websites, and mine was a revolving list of their sites, along with links to bands I knew personally, an emerging Etsy designer whose handmade bags I coveted, and some E/N dudes at the bottom under “Misc”. Again, this layout was circa 2003, and I checked, literally none of these websites still exist!

I maintained both the vanilla SunnyCrittenden.com and the NSFW SunnySlutDotCom, as well as a second NSFW blog on LiveJournal, up until I dropped out of college in 2002.

After dropping out of colIege, I decided the internet was becoming too mainstream and Google was becoming too good at indexing sites to be able to feasibly maintain two different and separate sides of myself online, so I merged the two sites and became the whole entity you see today!

I still technically own the domain SunnySlutDotCom, but it doesn’t point to anything anymore. For a while, I replaced most of the links on the sliced image map with links to SunnyCrittenden.con, until people understood the change, then I ultimately replaced all the links with links to Goatse.cx because, well, I’m an asshole I guess. And my roots are firmly planted in E/N, what can I say? I just didn’t want to give it up and have a porn site but it and try to profit from the fact that a good chunk of my webcam images have that domain in them.

So that’s the story of SunnySlutDotCom. May it rest in peace.