Complete Website History
It’s kind of a long story. Even if it wasn’t, knowing me, it would become a long story.
The Beginning: Dollie Days
In the summer of 2003, I found myself making tons of those cartoon dolls that were so popular back then – everyone used them in their AIM icons, and they were just all around fun to make. When a friend introduced me to Freewebs, I decided that I would make a website with my best friend Molly to display all of our dollicious creations. We called it Caramel Fudge Brownie Sundae (oh, what a mouthful to say… but great to eat!) and it consisted of a Freewebs pagebuilder layout, a shout outs page, and images of all the dolls we had made using various dollmakers. Little did I know that I was actually supposed to save each doll individually, I uploaded a massive .bmp file of all the dolls to the web. Considering I still had dial-up at the time (as did many more people than do now), it basically took an eternity to load, and nobody would wait that long.
When I grew tired of consulting with Molly about everything to do with the site, I made my own and called it Independent Sundae. It was basically the same as CFBS, except I was learning more about HTML and started to figure out a few things about creating my own layout and coding. One of my other good friends at the time knew a little about HTML, too, and she had once showed me a website she made on Angelfire before. Remembering this, I decided to move to Angelfire because Freewebs was very limiting at the time.
Things started to get better with my site, and I even had visitors, which I knew from my tagboard, hit counter, and “sister site” applications. I managed to code just another three frame layout, and despite my lack of a graphic program, I made simple layouts. But Paint was useful for pixelling dollmaker props, which I started to do extensively along with my friend Christie. Seeing that we were partners now, my site could no longer be “Independent” Sundae, so we renamed it Dollie Sundae. Because there were a few “Louis Vuitton” props out there, we thought it would be cool if we made a ton of LV props for a dollmaker. This was something that would set us apart, because we edited and designed a lot of these pixel doll props ourselves.
That December, I got Paint Shop Pro 8 for Christmas, and I started to create a surge of generic graphics that were found on every doll site, such as enter signs and button bases. Dollie Sundae was getting bigger and more popular over the following months, so I applied for hosting. I got accepted, but because of my slow dial-up and crappy computer, downloading an FTP program just wasn’t happening. I wound up declining the offer. Dollie Sundae started to decay from there, because I just felt like there wasn’t much potential with it anymore.
In March 2004, I decided to help Molly with her doll website that she had made after CFBS, called Hoops’z Dollz. I essentially took over a lot of it because I felt there was a lot of potential, and I had spent more time learning to code. I spent most of my time with it making and editing doll props for more “unique” dollmakers, kind of like what Christie and I had done for the LV dollmaker. I became preoccupied with Hoops’z Dollz and neglected Dollie Sundae, and over the next several months, Hoops’z Dollz became a lot bigger. But the fun eventually faded, and the doll sites basically have collected dust ever since.
Somewhere in the Middle: Blogging Began
In April of 2004, I made my first blog site on Geocities. I called it Supa H0norz, because we had just registered for high school classes, and I opted to take all honors courses. Clearly, zeros for o’s and z’s instead of s’s were cool at the time. I blogged there for a while until some time that summer, when I decided the site was in need of a revamp. So I made a new Geocities account, and I called my site H0nor Stud3nt. Again with the numbers, right? Well, I kept with it until some time in the fall, and then I decided that I didn’t like the numbers (or the Geocities ads), so I registered on Freewebs and turned the site into Honor-Student. I kept with that until the end of 2004, and then I kind of fell off the blogging universe, despite my claims that I would return soon.
In November 2005, I returned to H0nor Stud3nt, and I tried to be consistent with my site. I started to blog more, and I added some more pages about me, as well as some visitor goodies. The site started to come together, although my design skills weren’t so great. In the spring of 2006, I stumbled across the site of one of my former “sisters” from my blogging days, and she still had her domain, IndigoIsland.ca. I saw that she was accepting hostees, so I decided to apply. Soon, I was accepted, and I really felt I could enter the blogosphere that I’m a part of today.
Subdomain Hosting, and What That All Led To
Because I was now hosted on someone’s domain and not on a free server like Freewebs or Geocities, I decided to blog hop a lot and apply for affiliates at sites with blogs and owners I found interesting. I also joined some message boards and really started to make friends with other bloggers and site owners. Some of these people I am still friends with today, and it makes me happy that I’ve kept in regular contact with some of these people for almost three years now. Honorstudent (I removed the numbers and the space) continued to grow, and I grew excited when I stopped using i-frames and figured out PHP includes. That was my major accomplishment before I moved on to the continuation of Honorstudent, Slant Rhyme.
In September 2006, Angela got a new domain, Falling-Dreams.ca. I moved along with her and renamed my site Slant Rhyme, based on my love of poetry and my own imperfections. At this point, I decided to stop using images that weren’t mine in my website layouts and I started to use my own photography and designs. I added a subdivision to the site called Skymatter, which consisted of my writing portfolio (very much like the one on here today).
In April 2007, Angela decided that she wasn’t going to continue with webdesign anymore, and told us that her domain would expire that summer. I decided to hop to it and find a new host, and my new home for Slant Rhyme was with Olivia and Rosanna at Letters to You. I remained there for a year, blogging and adding some more brushes and my own fonts, until April 2008, when I got the domain LoveChem.net for my birthday, which is where I am today!