Site History
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Site History
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| ...that Stronghold's development started back in March 2006? |
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Realm667, a private and personal webpage will soon celebrate its tenth birthday. Considering the fact that most personal web pages out there only exist for a few years or get abandoned even earlier, I can take this as a definite milestone for this page as it is still up to date with numerous content being added every once in a while. Though, it hasn't been that easy when I started my first version back in 1999 and I would have never believed that almost ten years later my web page is still online and gets still visited over 200 times every day. So, what has it looked like in earlier times? What has been changed on the page and how did things happen to turn out as they are right now?
"In the beginning, there was void..."
"In the beginning, there was void..."
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Everything begun back in 1999 when I did my first few steps in the world wide web and I really have to tell you, these few steps have been very expensive, about $0.05 per minute but that didn't put me off. I was already working on Doom maps and I really wanted to release these efforts to the newly discovered huge communities like Doomworld.com and Doomnation.com to get some feedback and response. Unfortunately my knowledge in this term wasn't the best at all so when I started with my first homepage in May 2000, I only used Microsoft Word and the Geocities.com Pagebuilder for the Code and Corel Photopaint 4.0 for the few graphics I kicked in. The first version of "Tormentor's Realm 667" was white/red btw, but this kind of bright outfit didn't make it very long and white was replaced by black (1)
Months later I discovered the benefit of frames and made a little redesign with the help of Microsoft Word 98 (yes, yes, shame on me!) and added a few nice Javascripts and Javaapplets like Counters, Rolloverbuttons, Expanding Menues and other goodies to spice things up. And - believe it or not - I even won a few awards with this homepage ("Site of the Month" by DoomWadStation, "Site of the Month" by All4Gaming, "Top Site Award" by DooMiNatioN). In the beginning of 2001 I got my hands on Microsoft Frontpage 98 and adjusted some of the crappy code in my old "Word HTML" to make everything look a bit more organized. In 2001 my doom addiction grew and together with my good old friend Boris "Acidflash31" Butschkau I created a 2-man mapping team called Orbit Interactive. We had thousands of ideas, we were fully motivated and the only thing that was left to do was to create a new home for our creations. I still can remember the cold and snowy evening when we both created the homepage for Orbit Interactive (2) Sure, it was still far away from my todays standards, but it was a well organized site and a good base for our upcoming projects. The only bad thing about it was the fact, that our upcoming projects never saw the light of day due to the lack of motivation and interest and when I feared the worst, it actually happend and Acidflash31 quit the doom community, so there was no more need to keep Orbit Interactive alive. Though a lot of work has already been done to our first project called "Perforated Entrails" which was exclusively designed for Skulltag and I didn't want to waste that all so I created a single homepage (3) for Perforated Entrails itself which got hosted by NewDoom.com The page itself was created in about 10 minutes and without my companion I had no more interest in completing this project so the left shards were put together and released as a small Lite version to the community, the page removed and everything doom-related was gone. Though this never meant an absolute end to me. After these disappointments with doom homepages and projects, I joined two classmates (Daniel "DTNo1" Thajer, Daniel "TheUdo" Richter) of mine who created a page for all kind of games, filled with files, cheats, tools, screenshots and many other things. So the first thing I have done here was a new site design with frames and nice nifty things which replaced the old simple green one. (4) After two months and a large interest in our new project All4Gaming I felt like once more redesigning the page and making it even better, with many new small details and changes and so did I. The new design was darker, more user friendly and beyond had more space for content which was the most important thing for me. (5) Unfortunately after some infighting and disagreements the team broke up and the complete project was trashed. Yet again lots of free time and yet again, my old friend Acidflash31 ended the boredom with the discovery of the RPGMaker2000, a tool to create your own RPG game like Final Fantasy, Zelda or Secret of Mana and yet again I needed a new homepage (or in this case a second pendant for my red Doom Realm 667) and there it was. (6) About 7 months later I got my hands on Adobe Photoshop 5.0 and everyone who has already worked with that program knows about its capabilities. For me it was clear: "I need a new page design" and so I started with something totally different, new colors, new design, new style, new content and beyond a new system because this was the first page in PHP working with HTML templates, much easier and much more comfortable although very simple, Realm667 v3 was born. (7) About another 7-8 months later I was annoyed by the boring and simple design and for the page's 3rd birthday I had something more impressive in mind, something with more detail, with more extra stuff and with more contrast, Realm667 v4 was finished within one month, thx goes to my neverending motivation when I start something new :) Just take a look at your own. (8) The great thing about this one was really the look, the detail and the eyecandy but this goes also hand in hand with the bad things about the design: Too overcrowded and by far too frisky and when time passed and I clearly developed my own style of webdesign, I more and more felt like I had to do something about this and so I started with the developement of Realm667 v5. (9) The next step for me was changing to a more professional CMS that features some more usability and a user-friendly system and that's why I chose Joomla as the base for my new Realm667 v6 and as we all know: Someone needs to create a new template/design for such a system, and there it was. (10) But as we all know, changes are continueous and certain, so maybe also the latest Realm667 v6.5 that looks so perfect now might change in the near future... but I do not wish that this will ever happen again, thanks to the shitload of work involved with. (11) But as it is with all kind of designs, after some time you just stop liking them. Also considering that I added countless new and additional content to the Realm667 v7.0(12), I was in the definite need of a new template. By accident, I got my hands on a very cool Joomla template, that I used now for quite a while - altered to fit my site's conditions, but that goes without saying. It seemed to be perfect in the beginning. In the upcoming year, I worked a lot on Joomla homepages for my new job and the good thing about it was, that I learned a lot about CSS and how the system works. It seemed for me as it was time to completely style my own page without having a base at all. Another problem was the sheer amount of content, I put into the Realm667 and after some while, the logical conclusion was to split the Realm667 up into 3 different pages. And that's what I did. The only problem now was that I felt like it was time to give the page a new design that fits to the new content... and well... here it was, Realm667 v8.0 (13) This system was running well for almost 2 years which is a lot of time considering how may changes we already had in the past. Though, one big problem was the base content-management-system Joomla that I have chosen in the past. The development of the version 1.0 has been stopped and several issued security holes would never get a fix, and that was a serious problem, not only in terms of spam. Either way, I had to update the page to the Joomla 1.5 version and that incorporated lots of migration work and changes - and being at it, I also took the opportunity to enhance countless things that have been mentioned by the communty (like loading tims and content display). And well, here it actually was, the latest instance of Realm667 (14). During an unfortunate end of 2012, the Realm667 was hacked by a malware that actually compromited numerous Joomla pages in the whole web. The main problem was, that the system was so damaged, that a complete reinstallation was necessary to make sure the pages are cleaned the malicious code was gone. In that downtime I also took the opportunity to clean, update and fix several things that have been around for a while now. After several weeks of continous development, the latest v10 of the Realm667 was finished.
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The full changelog delivers you with up-to-date information about all the little or larger changes I did to my homepage. For an even more detailed information - partially filled with heavy overuse of bad english - read the news archive.
Changes from January 2013
Updated Joomla 1.5 to the latest version available
Removed JoomlaStats 2
Added j4age Stats
Changes from February 2012
Changes from December 2011
Changes from October 2011
Changes from July 2011
Changes from December 2009
Changes from January 2009
Changes from May to August 2008
Changes from January to April 2008
Changes from September to December 2007
Changes from June to August 2007
Changes from January to May 2007
Changes from August to December 2006
Changes from January to July 2006
Changes from January to May 2006
Changes from September to December 2005
Changes from January to August 2005
Changes from August to December 2004
Changes from January to July 2004
Changes from May to December 2003
Changes from January to April 2003
Changes from June to December 2002
Changes in May 2002
Changes from August, 2001 to February 2002
Changes in September, 2001
Changes from January to August, 2001
Changes in December, 2000
Changes from August to November, 2000
Changes from June to July, 2000
Changes in May, 2000