My previous post discussed some of the technical details about this upgrade, and the reasons for it. What I did not really cover though was the content of this site, and that's probably a more interesting story.
This site is called "Millennium X" (ten) because it's the tenth in a series of major design upgrades to occur since its inception nine years ago. I enjoy this site a great deal, even though my work on it has become sporadic, because this is where I got into hacking.
Early Days
On April 1, 1997 I uploaded my first site to Geocities. It's gone now (maybe I'll upload all of my old sites to this server at a later time). My subject matter was Sailor Moon, and I was just becoming interested in Anime and the Internet. The site was called "Central Control" after a construct in the Americanized version of the show. The site never had much interesting content (at least not in retrospect!) but I enjoyed working on it. Over a few months, I developed my HTML skills.
- Central Control 2
- Central Control 5
- v1, 3 and 4 are lost to the ages.
One day I was in the convenience store in the Shell Station by the Royal Oak Mall and I picked up a copy of NZ NetGuide. There was an article offering tips on how to spruce up your website with JavaScript, and had links to sites where you could find more info. I memorized the URL, and looked it up later. I began integrating scripts I found with my website, which became "Central Control JE" ("Java" Enhanced - someone eventually told me the two weren't the same thing).
- Central Control JE
- Central Control JE/2
- Central Control SE/"Central Control Millennium" lost to the ages.
The site became more elaborate, and I renamed it "Millennium". The first was just a re-skin of the CCJE site. I was more interested in creating style variants than working on the content! I branched out and created numerous prototypes. Every site overhaul was now a huge monolithic exercise that took weeks since all content had to be updated to match the new style.
I discovered the new version of Netscape Navigator - the 4.0 series, and found some demos showing off what was possible with layers. I was amazed, and quickly realized my select boxes and rollovers were woefully inadequate. I began work on a comprehensive update to Millennium II called (logically) Millennium III. It had a number of slick style updates and a lots of gratuitous layer usage and image maps. Since I was still learning JavaScript and the new APIs in Netscape 4.0, the curve was steep and the site took a couple of months to produce. By the time I was done, I realized I no longer really liked the style. Drag. Time for another major overhaul!
The next one was the first significant overhaul since I began to monkey with scripting. Millennium IV ("Antares") featured an updated graphic design and a sophisticated DHTML menu structure. It still used frames, but hid it well. The site also had more actual original Sailor-Moon related content, enough to win it an award on the WSMWPE.
Following Millennium IV, I decided to tone down the fancy effects and came up with Millennium V. Instead of overdoing it on the JavaScript, I overdid it on the gratuitous scanlines. There was a lot of sophsiticated detail in thsi site, and the design was fairly baroque with a mammoth hierarchy of nested tables.
- Millennium V
The next article in this series talks about the post-M5 Sailor Moon sites I worked on.
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