Backstory

It all started one summer a very, very long time ago. Back in the summer of 2007, right before I began my sophomore year of high school, I stumbled upon a new challenge that I was very eager to take up. I was an avid Neopets user (no shame in that. I've been on Neopets since pretty much the first year that it was released. I'm super cool like that. Anyway.) and was perusing the boards. I saw someone making a request for a guild layout, and I thought to myself, "I'd like to try to do that." So I looked up how to code and made my first crappy attempt at a layout... complete with paint graphics and someone else's premade code. With little prior experience to web design, other than the "websites" I would make on my computer with PowerPoint or a Folder Hierarchy system, my first steps into the actual CODING and DESIGN part of the web design world came about through Neopets. It is true that I took a web design class my sophomore year, but it really wasn't any more helpful than all of the learning I did myself.

I spent my first couple of years designing for Neopets. I made all sorts of layouts and all sorts of friends. I even joined with my friend at the time, CC, to make "NeoSpace" - a site full of myspace looking layouts for Neopets. Looking at her code was how I learned all about the wonderful world of CSS and Divs and never positioned with tables or coded with straight HTML again. I had a plethora of sites - everything from premade layouts, to directories, to newsletters, to reviews, to topsites... if it was a type of site on Neopets, I had made one. Cloudy Day Layouts, made in the Spring of 2008, was the start to the evolution that has now brought you to this blog. Another one of my popular sites was "Irrevocably Twilight", back when the Twilight fad was still huge, and you could find a Twilight Themed site on every street corner. I'd like to think that I had one of the better, more popular ones that did it for the love of making layouts and not for the 15 minutes of fame.

From Neopets, I took my talents to free hosting sites like Webs or blog and resources sites like mine that offered a free subdomain and free hosting. I still had Cloudy Day Layouts at this point. Unfortunately, in the Spring of 2009, right after its 1 year anniversary, my host didn't renew her site, didn't tell me, and I lost everything. I'm not one to backup files (cuz I'm a genius like that). Devastated, I left the web design world for a couple months, and came back with Ripple Effect. Of course, by the end of the year, the same thing happened to Ripple Effect (still didn't back anything up), and once I can I lost everything... including my sanity.

In 2010, Ripple Effect morphed into RaveShock. I had stumbled across an "adopting domains" site and applied for the domain "overloadd.com" I didn't get it, sadly... but I tried again with "raveshock.com" and was accepted. I had RaveShock for a year and made a lot of friends and gained a lot of experience. My host told me when RaveShock's name was expiring, that she wasn't going to renew it. It was then that I decided to change it into The Noodle Scooz. I got a free co.cc site (probably the worst decision I ever made in my life. After all the shit I had to deal with from them, I despise co.cc) that lasted for about 3 months. At that point, I had participated on a site called Ice Caves (since closed) and won free domain names and hosting for a year. It was at that point that I changed my site to Eight Is Even.

This past spring (2013) when it came time to renew my domain name, I decided not to. I don't have money and I haven't really been keeping up with 8i7 for the past year. So much so, that I didn't realize until right now that I've actually had that site for the past 2 years and not just 1. I'm moving towards online portfolios and more professional web design - I haven't made premade layouts in so long. So, instead I decided to open this blog to use basically as I was using 8i7 for... only maybe a little more directed and a little less "blog once every couple months about all the random shit that's happened to me since the last time I've blogged, so that it's not a decent story, just rather a bunch of little seemingly unrelated stories". Although, to be fair, the way my mind works, that's probably just how I talk.

And that's essentially the timeline of this particular site. Although there are SOOO MANY other facets to the past 6 years of my life that contributed to where I'm at in the web design world today. I created and co-ran "The Design" in the summers of 2011 and 2012 with some of my best site friends, Karlee, Aashni, and Mari. I had sites relating to me and my friends, like Jordigail or The We Hate Shane Club. I had too many sites to count across neopets, some of them more popular than others. Quite a few of them were unique and different. I made Myspace layouts... mostly just for me and my friends. I've dabbled in all sorts of other types of coding - Tumblr themes, Blogger Themes, forum coding, etc. Basically, everything I come across, I try. I like learning new things, expanding my horizons, acquiring new skills, accepting new challenges, and just trying something new.

I hope that if you're still with me, and didn't give up on reading the history of this blog, that you enjoyed it... as much as one can enjoy reading something as completely and utterly pointless as this backstory. But that's how I've gotten to where I am today. That's how I decided to become a web designer. That's how I've spent entirely too much of my free time for the past 6 years. That's how I am who I am today. And to think it all started from that one little post on Neopets.

For your viewing pleasure: First Ever Official Site