About darksiren.net

Well, here we are again... with a new version of the site, in 2006 2008. I so rarely update these "about" pages, usually only when I'm updating the site layout in its entirety.

I've been on the web since 1997, the year I started college (boy was I young!) My site didn't become "darksiren's domaine" until early 2001. Before that, it was called "Mieu Sedai's Reality" -- first on Tripod, then on Simplenet before it got bought out by Yahoo, before I finally caved in and started paying for a domain name and webspace. First I tried A+Net, then another horrible attempt at web hosting that probably folded by now (I don't even remember the name), and finally HostForWeb, an excellent service I'm not afraid to recommend to my friends who want to take that big leap into domain hosting. I've never looked back ever since getting paid hosting, and I intend to keep darksiren.net alive until I die (and beyond, if I can help it!)

During the Reality days, my site was quite a repository for my hobbies. I had video game pages, reviews for my whole CD library, my list of fangirl obsessions, various writings (including Reborn Again, which I still host in its original form to this day) and links to friends' sites. Most people who remember me from those days know me for having founded the Breath of Fire fan community and the first BoF Fanfics page. I should note, though, that my husband Jon met me not through Breath of Fire, but through Shining Force. He got to my page when searching for Shining Force pictures, took a risk and contacted me, and 6 or 7 years after that, we got married! -_^

But I digress. After a while I got weary of maintaining all of these different aspects of my site, and craved a more unified and dynamic scheme. So I started looking into PHP templating solutions, which brought me to Smarty. This really opened my eyes to the power of PHP, and eventually as my laziness with coding increased, I went and sought out various blogging software and content management systems (Nucleus and Geeklog are two I've used previously). Over time I got lazy with content altogether, and somehow or another turned into a fulltime blogger. I'm sure that disappointed a lot of people, but I was going through a lot of depressing, difficult and just plain distracting things in the background. Yes, including DragonRealms! But that's beside the point.

I never really got back into making static websites about games and music and other topics I like. I've been a big fan of dynamic content ever since getting into PHP and MySQL. I like the idea of being able to just write about whatever I feel like writing, when I want to. So now my site is primarily made up of weblog entries, wiki pages and CMS-generated static pages. Drupal is by far the most complex CMS I've ever attempted to install, but it has so much potential, so much flexibility, that I just had to bite the bullet and try it. So that's what's powering darksiren.net now. Here's hoping it doesn't fall apart! ^_^;

But what is darksiren.net really about? It's really all about me -- my ramblings and my disjointed, eternally unfinished projects -- which may seem quite self-absorbed, really, but this IS a personal homepage. On the other hand, you may (through search engines or whatever else) find something I've written about or created that inspires you, that piques your interest, that you can sympathize with, that you like as much as I do. It's those sorts of reactions that make it really worth it to have this site online.

Whether I'm your friend, or you're merely a passerby on the web that'll forget about my site the next day... thanks, for taking the time to read. ^_^