Sitely

Basic Photoshop Lineless

Featured Pokemon

The History of SoTD

My career as shadowfiles, a webmistress, could almost have been said to have started by accident. When I was about 10 years old, I had spent alot of time playing Neopets and chatting. My username there had been 'shadow_files'.

So, as I played Neopets, I would go on the forums and talk to people. Most of the time, I had found myself talking or roleplaying with other Pokemon fans. I had became friends with many Pokemon fans on Neopets, and by March of 2005, I was eager to start a Pokemon guild. With lack of creativity, I had named the guild to the like of "~/*-The Pokemon Land Guild-*\~".

When I started the guild, I had noticed that it was nothing but a bunch of colored boxes and some text that said "Welcome to the Pokemon Land Guild!". I believe I may have asked someone, although my memory does not serve well, about the bland result of a guild. In any case, I had found myself at the Neopets HTML tutorial, learning to create my first very simplistic guild layout. It was thus that I had started coding, and it was thus that I furthered my knowledge by googling for more through HTML tutorials.

But, about halfway through the month of March 2005, I had longed to enhance the guild by creating a site. I had done so by going to the only webhost I knew at the time, Geocities. The original site was conglamerated together by all I knew of HTML. The navigation was of random buttons on every page. and since I didn't know about tables, I didn't know how to create a sidebar. The images were crudely drawn bitmaps, causing the site to load slowly.

I recall that my lack of activities to host within the guild was what had started the shift from a guild site to a general Pokemon site. In an attempt to keep the guild's site from being empty, I had created random Pokemon based content.

The Pokemon Land Guild site was filled with bitmaps. Geocities provided about 15 mb of space that I quickly used by hosting bitmaps. I had started the search for a host with more space. At the end, I found myself with 1AspHost, a host that offered a whooping 100 mb of space. I had stayed with this host for about a year and a half where my experience in layouts went from my first sidebar to my first image based layout.

During this time, the original Neopets guild was dying. I didn't deny that the site was no longer a site for the Neopets guild although I kept the name "PLG". After the one and a half years or so at 1AspHost, I had ended up leaving from an urge to create an oekaki. I had started the long trek for a free host that supported PHP and MySQL and discovered Logical-Host, a free forums-based host that offered up to 50 gigabytes of space. While I had been posting at Logical-Host to earn a plan, I started considering a domain name. It was through WHOISes and MSN conversations that I conjured up 'desertshadow.net'.

Logical-Host was amazing for about three months. No ads. Everything worked smoothly. But, they had to close down due to lack of funding. I suppose offering hefty bits of space for one-time forum posting was a short-lived offer. I was extremely enthusiastic to webmistress the new site, 'Shadow of the Desert', and had tried to complete daily updates. But, as said, Logical-Host was short-lived; it had closed down, and I recall being distressed at having lost about two-thirds of my content.

I remembered I had skirted around for another free host, but nothing free was as good as Logical-Host was. I started seriously considering a paid host, especially since at this time, I had already obtained a domain name.

I finally settled at 1and1, the host I still use today, and the registrar from which I had first obtained the 'desertshadow.net' domain. However, I remember in part that the initial distress from having lost much worked content stopped me from wishing to continue much further. Alot of the content had been backed up and could be reloaded, but some was lost completely such as the "Pinball Guide" which had taken several hours to completely write.

Shadow of the Desert faced a period of being 'dead' for a bit less than a year. It was after that period, at the same time the layout "Version Rebirth" was released, that this history page was written. There was an original history page at some point though.

And as history pages are rewritten, created, and destroyed, the history of this site and all continues to commence, whether as a bland period of neglect or the continuous trials of multiplying content.

Sister Site

Affiliates

Topsites

Clubs

Links