About
Roots
The first real root of this site was a small two page set of links to favourite sites. To this day I'm unsure why it was made or how I managed it. At the time of creation (Sometime in 2001) my real on-line time was limited to browsing and posting at message boards, chat's and little else. For some reason a guest book was added to the "site" which was hosted on my ISP web space.
Memory is foggy, but by either late 2001 or early 2002 my ravenous posting appetite had disappeared. I'd given up my moderator's job at Khazad-Dum (A message board which unfortunately breathed it's last in mid 2007.) and I suppose was looking for other things to do with my time.
Thus the second phase of the sites history began, I redesigned what little there was, added some personal pages, including poetry, my dogs and the odd scrap of writing. Once done it was at last a site, rather than on-line bookmarks collection. This redesign was much aided on the coding side by the venerable Ahdkaw's advice.
At this point things had reached a, "What else can I do with this thing?", stage. And looking at Ahdkaw's Sensibilium I thought. "Hmm a forum I could try that". In truth I didn't think I would have the capability to install one in the first place. That was the challenge small as it seems now. I had no feeling that it would be any real use if I could.
The message board era
After finding some free ASP hosting I installed somehow, following Sensibilium's lead, a free message board. A Snitz forum. Some good friends even took time out to post at it and all was well. Until the host disappeared. Undaunted I decided to try again with another free host, this time using PHPBB. After a few false starts and carelessly lost databases. We began in April 2002 what can still be found post wise at the current board. Now running on Invision Power Board.
Since that time the site has splayed it's fingers somewhat, grown and then contracted, then grown on in other ways. Long ago we moved to paid hosting as anything free was so unreliable. Parts have been added and removed from the site and at the moment it's as compact as it's been in a while.
Now the forums are less busy but far from dead and the site twice as busy, this is largely due to the web design bug I picked up through running the PHPBB board.
I'm not really sure how it happened but I really enjoyed making templates for it. Now there are a good few freely available templates at the site here and this brings in the main stay of traffic.
On second thoughts this is the short version, I'm missing out a lot. However to tie things up. I'd like to thank all the people that have helped this site. In the main they are the posters at the forums, past and present. Whether they care for the place or not they spent or spend their time here. Some contributing poetry and articles to the site too. Having spent valuable time here means something to me.
For a seriously heavy initial influence on web standards and the origins of this site, Sensibilium and Ahdkaw. For my original interest in the web and message boards, Khazad-Dum and Imladris now gone.
Design, well I'd like to think I've come on a lot in that as well as in coding standards. The influences have been many. Too many to list, but a lot of the individuals reside in the phpbb or Invision communities and that, well that will just need to do.
You know people are right history is boring. Not something I usually agree with.