From what I can remember, I've been online to some degree since around the year 1999, when I was 11 years old and only got the opportunity once a week on Sundays when my sister and I spent the day with our grandma and grandpa. As I'm sure you can imagine, I wasn't all that ambitious a web-surfer back then, content to just go to a chatroom (God, the drama! It's like remembering a horrible dream) and play on Neopets like all self-respecting tweens do.
As I got a bit older, started taking Information Technology classes at highschool, and got ahead of the rest of the class, my teacher took the time to print me out a bunch of pages featuring basic HTML commands for building a website, and I guess that's where it began.
The timeline gets a bit confusing from there, but I think it was around that time that I got into my 'Harry Potter' fanfiction (yes, I was 12 or 13 when I discovered slash. Go sue the internets or something) craze and went absolutely nuts for a few years online, practically living and breathing the stuff. During this period, I believe, was when I made my first website. Scroll a bit further down the page if you'd like to hear about that tragedy.
At some point I abandoned the site and most of HP fandom, and my online time was occupied by LiveJournal, the Yahoo! 'Harry Potter' chatroom (beginning February 2003, ending 2005 some time, though I visited sporadically until the room was inexplicably closed by the tyrants at Yahoo! some time last year or so), 'The Lord Of The Rings' movie fandom (2000 - 2006), and LotR Real Person Slash (2003/4 - earlyish-2006).
Mid-2006, I somehow fell back into Snarry (that's the Harry/Snape ship, for the uninitiated) fic, gave up pretty much all other online pursuits, and made it a personal goal to read every long (10,000+ words) story available to my insatiable reading addiction. Since then, I've run out of longfics and have had to resort to whatever shorter ones I can find, plus whatever new fic I manage to stumble across.
As the flow of accessible reading material has slowed recently, I've got myself back into regular online habits, such as my fanlistings (see below for that history) and building this personal website (which had been on hiatus since way back in fuck-knows-when. November 2005, according to records. I mean, technically it's never really been "up," as even though it's been open since shortly after I set up the domain, I've never got around to actually putting up any substantial content).
I still read fic most of the day, but what can I say? You can take the girl from the fandom, but you can't take the fandom from the girl. :D
Want to skip quickly between the sections of this page?
- Website: the first I owned.
- Emails Address: the first I used.
- Domain Names: story a la quirk.
- Hosting: my disastrous backstory.
- Fanlistings: a love story.
- LiveJournal: the rich man's MySpace.
Hm... I'll be honest and say I don't remember exactly when it was, but it was a very long time ago (back near the beginning of my internet life), and it was on Envy.Nu. It was garishly colourful and curly-fonted, and the coding itself, as ashamed as I am to admit it now, wasn't actually written by me. I had no idea how to use frames back then (and even though I do now, I wouldn't use them anyway. *gag face*), and a very, very kind woman whose name I'm disappointed to say I don't remember (I have an idea of who it might've been, but I can't quite make that leap of memory to be sure), was generous enough to write the template up for me.
I can't even imagine using coding or templates written by anyone but myself these days; heck, I consider people who use programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver as cheaters! Oh, the folly of youth!
Notepad FTW!
Okay, first of all, I want to make this clear: I created this address when I was 11! That's 11, eleven, XI. One more than ten, two years before even becoming a teenager. Therefore, it was Lame. Capital 'L' very on purpose. And therefore, I cannot be held accountable for the mind-numbing levels of Lamification readers may or may not experience due to reading the following line.
slayerchik69 @ hotmail.com
Yes, I was a 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer' fan. Yes, I thought of myself as a "chik". And yes, I did find using the number 69 clever and funny.
*sigh* Tragic.
I purchased my first domain name - the very one you're currently viewing - through an Australian company called Smarty Host (no, I won't link them). I cannot even describe my displeasure at the appalling "service", a term I use loosely, I received from them, both online through emails and LiveChat, and over the telephone. I eventually cut ties with them and transferred my custom directly to the registrar, Enetica. No one needs a middle-man like Smarty. Definitely don't recommend them to anyone.
After the closing of Toasty Host (*points down*) and deciding I didn't want to be shafted, price-wise, by Enetica anymore (seriously, $25/pa for a .com? I think not), I transferred both of my active domains over to Namecheap in early September, 2007, and I feel much better for it (so does my bank account).
As for the explanations behind the actual domains...
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knoifey-spoony.com (registered: April 15, 2004) - I always get a giggle out of this when someone recognises the reference of this domain name without being told. For those not in the know, it's actually from the episode of 'The Simpsons' where the Simpsons go to Australia. The entry on Urban Dictionary explains it best. The specific spelling of my domain makes me very nostalgic these days, and serves as a nod to some American friends I used to have who got a bit too much of a kick out of ribbing me about my accent.
(For an expanded history of this domain/website, see my page on KSCom's backstory.)
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slightly-bonkers.net (registered: October 4, 2005) - This domain is the home of my fanlisting collective! The name came to me after a while of thinking for one, and I'm sure I'm not the only person who thinks it's entirely fitting. I am a bit like that, and I do get a bit more like that when it comes to things I love; what better domain for my fanlistings?
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psychopho.be (registered: uh, don't remember?) - Ah, this domain was just registered during a period where some company was giving one year free registration of .be domains. I never opened it with any content because I never really had anything to put on it.
I've come to think of myself as something of a curse on small webhosting companies. Before that though, I was originally going to get my hosting, as I got my domain, at Smarty Host, but since that fell through, I don't need to go into that any more.
My first host was TwistyBot. My second host was Toasty Host. Both, not too long after I signed up with them started becoming less reliable; the owners or help staff started replying very slowly, if at all, to support requests; downtime and errors were more frequent; and finally they disappeared completely for months on end, abandoning customers to the wind. Both are now closed for business.
As of January 2007, I'm hosted by my first big company. Aside from a few hiccups I had during the initial transfer (which were sorted through speedily and politely), things have gone relatively well, and I'm hoping things won't turn out the same way as my first two unfortunate experiences. Fingers crossed! :)
I'm not positive of exactly when I first got into fanlistings. I know the first time I came across the site was a number of years ago, but I didn't understand what it was about, so I left and didn't go back for a long time. I joined the official message board in February 2004, but I was definitely joining FLs before I signed up there.
My first listing wasn't technically a fanlisting, rather it was a namelisting for, if you can take a wild guess, the name Naomi! It was opened September 2004.
My first fanlisting was for the Australian musician Chanel Cole, but I closed that one in January this year. It was opened November 2004.
My first physical fanlisting was for Liv Tyler! It was opened September 2004 as well!
I currently own 14 fanlistings. The most I've owned at one time was 21. :) At one point, when I was using Flinx to manage my Joined fanlistings, I was a member of over 1,700. Due to a stupid mistake on my part, however, I lost those records in early '07, and have had to go through all TheFanlistings.Org's categories one at a time (*dies a little inside*). As of August '08, that process is finished, and at the time of writing this, I'm a member of 1,288 fanlistings! Hooray me!
I really, really wish I could remember when and with what username I first registered at LiveJournal. It was back when they still used invitation codes, but that's all I really remember. Unlike the case with my unknown helper on my first website that I mentioned near the top of the page under Website: the first I owned, my memory has seen fit to let me remember who gave me that first invite, but as I don't know that she'd appreciate my naming her, I'll decline to say. I do, however, recall her very fondly, because she was nice enough to give me that invite even though we'd only exchanged a few emails before (regarding something to do with the HP fandom, surprise, surprise), and she barely knew me.
That may not seem like much, but you have to remember that LJ invites weren't nearly as copious or freely given as Gmail invites are nowadays. They were hoarded and guarded like precious things by some!
So to my one-time benefactor, I thank thee.
Now onto the usernames I've had over time. I don't think it was my first, though it well could've been and I just can't remember, but the earliest I remember was dark_revolution. Just for the record, yes, I am acutely aware of how supremely lame that is. I had to bring the memory of it out of deep repression for this purpose.
Another I've had, but I'm not going to tell you the username of, was one I created to share the very small amounts of fanfiction that I'd written but was too shy to post under an indentifiable nickname. I'm such a sad sack. XD At any rate, this account's (the other as well) been deleted and purged, so there's nothing there to see anymore!
I only have two LJs at this point in time, and they are:
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knoifey_spoony (created: June 10th, 2003) - Now, in actual fact, the use of "knoifey spoony" was made for the purpose of this LiveJournal username before it became my first domain name, so simply refer back up the page to Domain Names: story a la quirk for the backstory on this. As I've aged, I've become increasingly annoyed with people (mostly younger, but some older without the good sense to avoid doing it) who are constantly changing usernames, be they for instant messenger programs, chatrooms, email addresses, or services such as LJ. Because of this, I avoid changing usernames on any program/service I'm subscribed to unless absolutely necessary. I don't plan to create a new personal, primary LiveJournal at any stage in the future. Unless I discover I have a violent, obsessive stalker (as opposed to my regular stalkers whom I have a creepy kind of rapport with but try to avoid all the same. I'm looking at you, Kara and Kya), in which case I may rethink this philosophy.
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the_knoife_life (created: June 16th, 2006) - Obviously this username is just a bit of a play on words and my username. You know, "the night life"? Except "knoife life" because of my personal journal. Yeah. You get it. This LJ was created because I wanted somewhere separate to organise all my icons and brushes and other graphics/resources that I'd created. :)
And you know... that's really all I can think of that has any (or none, depending on your perspective) significance from over the years that I've had access to the big bad interwebs. Of course, the story doesn't finish here. I'm sure I'll be around for years to come, making my stupid websites, cracking my stupid jokes, and just being a little bit stupid in general.
Catch you around the intranets! :)
