Speckled Green

History – the Design

Pressing-On was the brainstorm of an Aussie kid, Ant, a 15 year old student from Sydney, Australia. There I wrote about events in my life in the blog, post random things that I find, and put the odd note up on the main page every so often. Now, in 2010, it’s become just the blog of a Sydney teenager going through high school and living out life as each day comes (with a little bit of planning ahead thrown in).

This site began its days back when I was even younger, when I was trying to learn how to make a website with out a visual editor (e.g. FrontPage). After a few months of floundering about, I finally started to get the hang of it. Around that time, some of my friends had developed an interest in having their own sites, and this is what mainly kick-started my idea of making a proper website – a dream that wouldn’t be fulfilled for another month after that.

It was in the middle of August, 2007, that my friend Anthony Eden of Way2Web (check out his new blog at LocalitySwitch) told me about how he could provide good hosting. Later, in early September, I talked to him about his offer, and with a bit of brainstorming of names (I can’t come up with names) I ended up with the name Artemislate.com. And so, from the 15th of September, 2007, my idea of making a personal website came into reality. From then on my knowledge of HTML, CSS, and other internet related languages has grown (slightly).

Starting from humble beginnings (a page with basically nothing on it), Artemislate quickly grew into a template found off the net. But, as bored as I always am with these things, I decided to actually make up my own template. After a lot of playing around, I finally came up with the precursor to what was on Artemislate for its last month.

Then I came up with the theme I called Footprints. It was conceived from a few ideas I had seen around the net. Also, around that time I got bored of the name Artemislate.com, so I went a-brainstorming again for a new name, and I came up with Pressing-On.net (inspired by the song by Relient K). So I used footprints as the launching design for Pressing-On.net. Later I put Footprints through a revision process, and came up with the theme I call L-Lamp. I was rather happy with it for two weeks, before I decided I should make something new.

So, I spent three months searching the net for ideas, styles, templates, images, designs, anything to give me an idea, and I slowly built up Beaches which was really yet another revise of Footprints, except that I had written everything myself. The menu had taken ages to get like that.

In 2008 I decided that since I rarely updated the site’s main page with anything, and most people visited my blog (the only thing worth visiting), I would replace this main page idea I had, and replaced it with my blog, and solely my blog. Then I started learning to make my own WordPress themes (not as easy as I thought). Since then, I’ve created Changing, the first theme of the blog whilst at MidnightFire.net.au, and quickly produced its update which added more to the theme, but also made it more bulky, or ‘ugly’ in my opinion. Whatever it was though, I was still proud of it being my first working and separate WordPress theme.

By February of 2009, I was starting to think about possibilities of a new domain name (yet again?), and a new hosting plan. After doing some proper ‘market research’, trying to find the best Aussie deal, I found Cove. On the 17th March, 2009, I made my decision, and on 19th March, 2009, I officially opened up to the world my new domain name, MidnightFire.net.au, and released Changing to the public.

More recently, I went on a new learning exercise, trying to revamp Changing into something new. I wanted it to look reasonably uniform throughout browsers, and I wanted it to be more colourful than before. So I went exploring. Inspiration came from a theme I saw on the internet, and several different websites (really, that’s where most theme ideas come from, isn’t it?). My idea was to make a theme which would be kinda like Firefox: continually building on the same solid foundation, adding new stuff here and there, tweaking or removing old parts, and streamlining the whole thing over time.

So my current theme, one I named Repose (meaning rest. Yes, I looked that up in the thesaurus), is going to stay for a longer while. You’re just gonna see it change and morph as I add and remove things, change and tweak its feel, and streamline the entire thing (like making it work well on mobile browsers…).

As you can see, over the years I have changed my site from a hobby to a blog, from an orange page to a fully fledged WordPress site, from simple HTML4 to xHTML+PHP+CSS+jQuery, and I haven’t even yet tried adding AJAX! (BTW, AJAX is an upcoming addition to my theme, I hope)

So, that’s the history of my site, from Artemislate.com to Pressing-on.net and finally to MidnightFire.net.au!