About the Site

From whence did this site come? What happened along the way? And other such questions. We will have to take a journey into the past, to the year 2003(ish)...

I'm not actually sure when I started the site. I didn't always keep track of such things. However, I was originally on Geocities, with the username 'Edonil_Alantha'. The page had a bunch of links to my stories. No dolls! That's right, I didn't always have a doll site. But then I lost my password... Anyways, that account doesn't exist anymore. As far as I know, this was some time in early 2003.

LAYOUT ONE ~ So, in September of 2003, I started putting dolls up on my site (my geocities account was 'edonil_alanthaanulo'). This is also when I came up with the name 'Edonil's Lair'. The layout was done using tables. Very annoying to update. As an interesting note, this incarnation of my site had my logo, which was later dropped. Maybe I should make a new one...

LAYOUT TWO ~ Frames! *cringes* It was so much easier to add another section, but by this time, I had passed the stage where I was adding new sections. And there was also a splash page! This layout probably came into being in 2004. I changed the colours about once a month.

LAYOUT THREE ~ This one was made by a friend. I also changed the colours a lot. The special thing about it; it's using SSI. Hwesta made this layout for me after I got paid hosting. According to my archives, it's official Date of Being Working was June 15, 2005 (I was switching over for about a week before that). I changed the colours quite a few times with this one, and it was constantly dying. I swear, I just had to look at the code, and something would stop working!

LAYOUT FOUR ~ Made by me. Handcoding in notepad rocks! It took a really long time to make, because every sublink had an image... Never again! But it looks awesome, doesn't it? Put up on February 5, 2006. Never recoloured, because there were so many images. Because I made it, I didn't have near so many troubles. (By the way, it looks nothing like it was supposed to. The image in my head was a hundred times better. I might try for the original one day...)

LAYOUT FIVE ~ Illusory Luminescence? WTF? Anyway, weird name aside, I really liked this one. It was much more 'me' than the previous layout. It was all in bright colours! And I did away with some potentially important side links (ie Other Stuff). And coding it was a pain; the div boxes either did weird things in Netscape and Firefox, but worked great in IE, or their backgrounds scrolled in IE, but were fine in FF and NS. I ended up sticking more div boxes on top of the background divs. *sighs* But it looked pretty. And the favicon totally rocked, considering the amount of time (or lack thereof) that I made it in. The site was still a bit too 'pretty' and 'girlish' for my tastes, though...

LAYOUT SIX ~ Ah, Toxic Smear... Much more to my tastes than the previous one. I prefered the colours, the feel, and the design. I can't believe I once like the previous... I renamed the SSI layout pages 'submenu' instead of 'main' for this one, which meant I had to go through every page of the site to change the layout, but that just gave me an excuse to update my site, or at least see what needed help. Then, a few months later, I fixed up the code. I still had some remnants of the original 2003 code kicking around, I think. Anyway, it went to xhtml transitional 1.0, which took forever (or at least three months), because I had to close a bunch of tags and just generally make everything tidier.

So I've had six layouts, plus the page of links at the original geocities page, plus some other stuff (neopets, avidgamers, etc. - I don't consider those worthy of this page, and I'm too lazy to type it up). I've also coded some layouts for other people. Yay me! So this is where the site is at, now. Where will it go from here... </lame mysteriousness>