Giantpaper.org

eHistory

My first website, recreated 10/11 years later.

First used the Internet (yay) to search for websites related to my interests.
Got an ezboard.
Hung around on different ezboards, including this semi-large anime one called Arcticnightfall (it’s still up, although no longer an ezboard, obviously) with Jeidai. Met a whole bunch of different people (a few owned anime-theme collectives/websites on their own domains).
Got a Geocities site to host images for my messageboard.
Turned said Geocities site from an “image-dumping ground” to an actual site. It was nothing more than a group of fanpages dedicated to my four main interests at the time: Star Wars, Sailormoon, Pokemon and Dragonball Z.
(“Sakura’s Realm” it was called, since “sakura” was part of one of my earlier online aliases.)
(Layout wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t spectacular. Bright purple text on a black background with some sci-fi-looking graphics Geocities had).
Now that I have graduated from middle school and spent all of high school homeschooled, much of my free time was spent online.
Hung out on more messageboards (but because I had social anxiety issues, I lurked most of the time).
Learned some extremely basic HTML, enough to format my messageboard signatures.
(Learned how elitist some people can be…)

Diaryland...as I saw it in 2001

Diaryland! (blogging community) What fun! But wait, do I really want to have to sign up just for that? Nah, I’ll just make my own.
Made my own “blog” (it was nothing more than a page created with PageBuilder, with dated entries which I manually added myself).
Caved in and got an online diary at Diaryland, entering the blogging community.
Learned more basic HTML, enough to code a webpage (once I realized the limits of Geocities’ drag-and-drop PageBuilder editor).
(Also, I was now able to code my own layouts for my Diaryland thing. >:D)
The trial version of a text-based HTML editor called Aspire is what I started out with. Once Aspire expired (hee), I migrated to Arachnophilia.

Made just before one of our cats, Melfina (pictured) disappeared, making it the most depressing layout EVAR.

Geocities and their ads was starting to disappoint me. Earlier, they said they would only put one ad square in the corner of their sites. I was fine with that. But then, this ad square mutated into an ad rectangle that took up the entire height of the viewport.
Tried out Envy. Envy went down. Tried Batcave. I…don’t know what happened to that. Went back to Geocities, only to be confronted by those ads again.
Got my first domain. Also self-hosted blogs was kind of new and popular then, so I decided to try it out myself. I downloaded Greymatter, which was the WordPress of the early 2000s.
(ALTHOUGH I no longer recommend Greymatter to due to it being insecure.)
Now that I’m in college at this point, I started to think, SERIOUSLY think about what I wanted to do later in life. I knew of several fellow web masters who sold their services as web designers. I thought about that.
(Although my idea of a web designer back then was SO VERY DIFFERENT from what actual professional web designers do. XD)
Discovered personal art sites (like..cozypaper and…The Art Corner). I now have a sudden renewed interest in art.
Discovered the wonderful world of IM (AIM was the first one I got, followed by Yahoo. Although because most of my friends used AIM, the Yahoo one was long forgotten…).

(I found Gaia some time this year through one of the TAC artists. ^^ Although I didn’t join because as cool as it looked, the community made me feel shy.)
Got my second domain (giantpaper.org) and let the first one fade into Internet history.
Learned some CSS due to the fact that editing one file to change multiple files made eveything 100000x more convenient than editing every single file.
Most of those anime domain owners I ran into at Arcticnightfall? They either gave up running websites completely (by letting their domains expire) or just by taking an extended hiatus, which eventually leads to the domain expiring. I had no other way of “keeping in touch”* with them, so I silently bid my farewells.
*Knowing me, it was more like lurking or visiting their sites frequently without saying anything or leaving a guestbook comment or anything…
Learned some basic PHP from PHP and MySQL for Dummies. And some SQL.

Learned XHTML. And this thing called web standards.
Tried building my blog from scratch, using Michelle‘s Build-a-Blog tutorial on Codegrrl. My Greymatter blog (called Sea-Coat) faded into eHistory, may it rest in peace.
Gained some new online acquaintances/fellow bloggers (which I found through TheFanlistings.org…which I found through Codegrrl…which I found through Yahoo).
Homemade blog didn’t work out (the admin interface felt clunky, it was difficult to maintain and it was being spammed silly. D8). Angel of light WordPress to the rescue!
(Other than minor sites that received little to no love from me, I never have used WordPress. Ever. At all. I was late in the game. .___.)

Learned Flash in school. But because I had never taken the beginning Multimedia class (which gives an intro to Flash), my ability to use Flash was like…cutting grass with scissors (compared the rest of the class who were all using lawn mowers).
Learned quite a bit about digital photography in school, using my mom’s Canon S2 camera. (I later got my own, a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi for Christmas next year ). I now am able to take photos for use on my layouts, woohoo!
Slowly learned about the Web 2.0 trend. Noticed that a lot of sites giving into this trend used a lot of shiny graphics. DO WANT. =o=
While slowly getting over the social anxiety issue, I joined Facebook (mainly to see if I could find any old middle school classmates), Myspace (to see if I could try fiddling with the default profile layout)…

…Gaia Online (I remembered this from 5 years before and wanted to try it out) and Kongregate (games, games, games! =3=;).
Learned about Ajax…as in the web development technique.
(Graduated college in May. Which meant I now have a lot of online time. XD Umm…oh yeah, it also meant I should start looking for a job. I utilized sites like Dice, Indeed and LinkedIn for that purpose.)
(Also online-related, but I also got into MMOs. X3)

My character

Thanks to the generosity of one web designer (who used to work for our church), I was able to work on some freelance projects for her. ^^ So yeah, my dream of becoming a professional web designer is coming true.
Learned that when in doubt, Google is your best friend. Don’t know how to get a div to extend all the way to the bottom while still maintaining a fluid layout within all three columns? “100% height CSS fluid layout” is the answer! >:O