In 1995, Justin Carpenter started a personal web site called “Page Rancourt,” to mark his presence on the internet. Having a reasonable amount of web space at his disposal, he created and hosted a handful of other sites, including “The Official DND Homepage” (a site for the ASCII graphics predecessor of roguelike games, DND), “Three Warps ‘Til Neptune” (the internet’s earliest popular Gyruss fan page), and “WolfHome” (an early therianthropy site). In time, this evolved into “Per Aspera, Ad Astra,” a multifaceted site community he built with his ex-wife, which has since evolved into the Lothie Dot Com family of sites.

When Justin and Lothie separated in 2002, he built a new site community called House Rancourt, his most ambitious project to date, linking several open-source web applications into a single unified theme and management framework. House Rancourt introduced its community to the iNubis/iNoobz music hosting site, a robust custom story hosting engine, and a multi-user shared gallery for artists. In late 2005, House Rancourt introduced its community-centered online roleplaying environment, The American Riviera MUCK, which opened to its first players in January 2006. Along the way, artists such as Hudson Valley balladeer Ron Stetkewicz, artists Tim Johnson and Alopex Sigma, authors Silver James and Black Shanglan, and others came to call House Rancourt home.

House Rancourt served the public from early 2003 through early 2007, when a pair of closely-timed server failures took its original machinery offline. The difficulty of rebuilding the ancient and highly nonstandard code base from backups was judged to be too great, and in March 2007, with many tears, House Rancourt officially closed its doors. What would be rebuilt would be a web community, but it was decided that whatever was built, it would not be a new House Rancourt.

And so, in April 2007, The Bauhaus opened its doors. It isn’t nearly as technically adroit as House Rancourt was — no, it’s largely a collection of smaller individual sites for the hosted talent, with an “umbrella company” managing links, serving as a contact point for technical matters, and maintaining a feed for news on the site’s hosted talent.

This site will serve as a global news feed, summarizing key events in the other sites and tracking administrative news and announcements. For more detailed information on the artists hosted, subscribe to their individual RSS feeds on their sites. The “Contributors” section will list the site family that comprises The Bauhaus.