• flesl.net has existed, at its current address, since 2005. A much smaller site, with some of the same material and without its own domain name, came into existence in 2001. Some of the material now on the site dates back to the mid-nineties and some material I intend to put on in future goes back as far as the late eighties.
• I began thinking about an ESL website in the mid-nineties. I'd been saving things I'd done, and sometimes reusing them, ever since I first started working with a computer in 1989, and when I began using the web regularly a few years later, it occurred to me that a website would be an excellent way of sharing these materials.
• In late 2000 and early 2001, I wrote the first set of paired stories and used them in the classroom. By the fall of 2001, making a simple website had become inexpensive and straightforward, and I put a selection of the stories on the web in order to make them easily available to my students and my colleagues. I stopped teaching (at least temporarily) in 2002, but I kept the original website going with the idea of expanding it in the future. In the fall of 2004, I went ahead with this idea and have been working steadily on the project ever since.
• By the summer of 2005, ten pairs of the First Series of stories had been rewritten, and a Second Series of ten new pairs produced. All forty stories were then published on the original website along with other materials. These included a text called “Complex Sentences” I'd written in the mid-nineties and an incomplete “Grammar Glossary.“ Later in the same year, I registered the "flesl.net" url.
• In the spring of 2007, after a good deal of new material had been added to the site, it became clear that a basic redesign was required. The layout of the pages and the structure of the navigation system had to be improved and interactive material had to be included. This redesign work has turned out to be very time-consuming, but the first stage is now ready for publication.
-fl, xx, 2009