SMLMFG: a brief site history
Want to know how endless-roses.com got its start? Then, you've come to
the right place. I've been making webpages since early 1998, and I'm willing to tell my story.
I first got into Sailor Moon in 1998 when it was aired daily
on the Cartoon Network block, 'Toonami', and I really loved it. Granted,
the anime was cheesy, and then, I didn't even know manga existed. But hey,
something about it just made me smile, and it wasn't just
Darien.
Well, later that year, I opened a free account on Tripod (back
when they only had one popup ad). I had absolutely no HTML experience, and
thusly, my website consisted of one page with one picture. That's right,
one picture. Pretty pathetic, huh? Well, it gets worse. Because I was so
internet illiterate, that single picture was bitmap. BITMAP. *sigh* So,
even though there was only one picture, it took FOREVER to load.
The
next year, I looked at my webpage with one picture and decided it was time
for some changes (and no, I wasn't thinking about bitmap). I was slowly
picking up on the complicated world of HTML, and I decided to expand my
exsisting site plus have several pages outside of the Sailor Moon barrier.
I opened Moca's Ultimate ReBoot Haven, along with Moca's Sailor Moon
Site, to talk about the great show, ReBoot. That went okay; I had a few
pictures and character bios. I even opened up a Sailor Moon picture
gallery at about that time (it had about 10 pics).
Soon after, I even
opened Moca's Gundam Wing Ultimate to talk about the show Gundam Wing.
Although, that didn't really work because the only thing on it was a
fanfic that I wrote, but, hey, it was a start.
So here I was with three
webpages in one, and I realized, hey, I don't have time for all this.
Therefore, I closed my ReBoot and Gundam Wing sites and decided to focus
soley on Sailor Moon.
Okay, so I had a plan; I only needed a name.
Well, my nickname in grade school was Moca (take the first two letters and
last two letters of my name and smoosh them together), so I figured Sailor
Moca sounded nice. But I couldn't stop there, I mean how corny is Sailor
Moca's Sailor Moon Site. Thusly, Sailor Moca's Lil' Moon Flower Garden was
born (like thats not corny)! It's original and interesting!
Right, so I
had a cool name and a full picture gallery (sort of). Now, there was only
one problem: everything was in bitmap! I was still not experienced enough
to learn that bitmap is very very VERY very bad for webpages (and I'm
surprised I didn't run out of space for how large bitmap is).
Well, I
applied for my first award anyway; I mean, it seemed okay to me. I didn't
win it, obviously, but I learned a valuable lesson: Bitmap is very bad for
webpages.
So, finally, I lost the bitmap and gained jpgs. Oh, the joy.
My HTML was slowly coming along too. It was then that Sailor Moca's Lil'
Moon Flower Garden looked half decent and was quick to load!
I began
adding original things that no other site had, like something I called
'Tour the Garden,' which was a kind of fanfic where I, Sailor Moca, gave a
tour through my garden in a play-style writing. It was fun to write, and I
believe it was the big attraction of my site.
Soon, I won my very first
award! And then, another and another and another. I had four awards! I was
so happy.
But then (enter dramatic music here), paranoia sunk in. For one reason or another, the
internet started to scare me a lot. But, rather than duke it out against my
fear, I closed my site and deleted EVERYTHING. That was in November 2000.
*tear* Was that the end of Sailor Moca's Lil' Moon Flower Garden?
OF
COURSE NOT! It took me nearly two years to overcome my fear of the
internet. All my friends talked about their webpages from time to time, and
my mind would linger back to the memories of mine. I started to miss
talking to my fellow moonies, endlessly working to improve my site, and
the thrill winning awards!
So, about June of 2002, I started working on it
again. I tried to get things back to the way they were, but soon realized
that that was nearly impossible since I deleted everything without any
backup. But I still tried, and once again it was starting to look the way
it did. Now there was just one problem: I was bored with it. I was so sick
of having an everyday Sailor Moon site with the same stuff as every other
site on the web.
By July, I started work on Endless Roses (a shrine to
Darien and Serena, of course), while still keeping SMLMFG open. It was a
nice break from the tedious work of SMLMFG.
Then, one day in August of 2002, Endless Roses became better than SMLMFG, and it was
a lot more fun to work on. Thusly, the second and final closing of Sailor
Moca's Lil' Moon Flower Garden. SMLMFG
was special to me in the sense that it was my pride and joy for as long as
it was, even though it wasn't very good. It was my beginnings in
html, and everyone starts somewhere.
Endless Roses took over as my main site since that day, and I
have learned so much from every layout I have ever used (from tables to
popup to frames to div layers) and have met so many
people.
Endless-roses.com was born when I ran out of room on my Tripod
account and got so sick of popups that I wanted to go insane on Sept. 2,
2003. It has been up and running ever since, and will only continue to grow. :)
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