New Domain

About

Gender (In case you haven’t figured out): Male
Chinese Zodiac: Snake
Zodiac: Gemini or Cancer since I am on the “border”
Height: 1.73 m
~~Weight~~ Mass: Fluctuates between 56 and 58 kg
Birthday: 21 June 1989
Age: 18
Schools: Mee Toh School, Dunman High School and Victoria Junior College.

Colours: Blue, Yellow
Books: The Lord of the Rings, The Dark Tower series
Authors: J.R.R. Tolkein, Stephen King
Fantasy Settings: Middle Earth, All-World, WarCraft Universe
Mangas: One Piece, Death Note, Fullmetal Alchemist, Monster, 20th Century Boys
Animés: Eureka seveN, Evangelion, Code Geass, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
Games: WarCraft III
Movies: The Lord of The Rings Trilogy, The Day After Tomorrow
TV Series: Lost
Actors: Ian Mckellen, Viggo Mortensen
Actresses: Evangeline Lilly

Ahh… this site has come a long way. I’ve switched hosts n number of times, recoded x number of times, and left the site to die and be revived later a lot more times.

The site was first started out in 2002 for me to learn PHP. Wow, I can’t tell you how I feel when I look back at the things I coded way back then. The site name was corny too.

The design isn’t that appealing and… the contents embarrass me. The design shown is a redesign. The original one was worse and unfortunately, I don’t have any records of it. The site was hosted on Tripod UK.

Well, after getting some experience coding, I converted the site to a blog. Apparently, the blog is still live at this link.

I was young and ~~innocent~~ ignorant and so I did some things I live to regret.

At this stage, all the data were stored using flat files. This will continue for some time…

The so-called official birth of “New Domain”. A recode and redesign. I started using the Smarty Template System. I must say, I still like that design since it’s very simple. No screenshots, but you can still see the design at this link. I was hosted on some obscure host. Somehow, Darren Lim, who saw my now-defunct tagboard decided to offer me hosting.

In that screenshot, you can see the ancient administration interface I wrote. The oldest posts are still here =)

There were two more redesigns of that interface with different colour scheme but unfortunately, I only have a partial screenshot for one.

I launched Version 2 with a redesign. Version 2 was the first time I used graphics in my design. All the previous designs had little or no graphics.

A recoding was done. I discovered Object Oriented Programming and finally took the courage to learn MySQL. I recoded to whole site to run on a MySQL backend. Each version took on a different design. I was hosted for most of the time by Wei Qiang on his Buildtolearn account.

There were times when I almost paid for hosting but somehow, it never got through.

Version 5 was a milestone, deadlock, or whatever you like to hear.

I cleaned up the code, made MySQL querying more efficient, adopted RSS, killed and revive the sites a dozen (or so I think) times, and started coding more “professionally” as you might say. I added a “theme” changer to enable you to switch between themes from version 2 to 5. Livejournal cross-posting was inspired by the very same plugin I am using now to my Livejournal account.

The next milestone. I decided to stop coding and embrace what others have coded. I adopted WP =)

It took me a while to hack the site, install needed plugins, and edit the theme as I deem fit. I also took the chance to import all my posts from the New Domain [v1]. Do note that, however, some of the content might not work. That’s pretty much about the history of the site.