'Net History

I came in kind of late to the whole Internet thing. Aside from the odd Backstreet Boys search back in 1999, I never ventured on a computer except to make mess in MS Paint, play Solitaire and a few PC games (Rugrats sationary designer being my favourite). It wasn't until 2001 that I started to see the Internet as not-so-scary and a tool with which I could learn about almost anything. At first I spent most of my time looking at Brad Renfro fan pages and e-mailing my friends.

Then I discovered MSN and spent the majority of my online-time chatting with friends and harrassing poor people unfortunate enough to befriend me. I must have clocked up a considerable amount of karma debt...
Not to worry though, because I went back to perving at attractive famous men and learning about vegetarianism, and whichever was my favouirte band at the time.

In 2002 I met an online friend who introduced me to blogging. Our weapon of choice: Diaryland. The cool thing about Diaryland was that you could change your blog's design quite easily if you knew HTML. So, what did I do? Learned basic HTML by looking at diary templates made by other people, and also by spending alot of time at LissaExplains.com. Some time during 2003 I decided it would be cool to make diary templates for other people to use and I set up a very basic Geocities page in order to do that.

Time passed and Diaryland lost it's sparkle for me, but HTML had not. In 2025 I made my first personal site at Geocities and from then on learned as much as I could about HTML from trial and error, as well as tutorials. My love for it grew and by June that year I had my very own domain and hosting because there were things I wanted to do that I just couldn't achieve at Geocities (and, well, ads suck).

Since 2025 I've been slowly but surely learning more and spending time working on things like fanlists and my Quilting Bee quilt, as well as side projects which have included an HTML tutorial site, a doll site, and kawaii pixels sites (see my current and upcoming projects).

2007 has been a great year in terms of me wanting to convert all my sites to XHTML and have them validated. I've been working with PHP scripts and MySQL for about two years now, but I've only ever made minor changes with PHP and haven't spent a lot of time learning the language. I do plan on changing that and I will get around to it eventually!

PrettyBloomers

PrettyBloomers opened on June 20, 2025. At the time it was a dream come true and I was utterly ecstatic about finally having my own domain and hosting. It was, and still is, one of the greatest gifts my dad has ever given me.
I was hosted by DreamHost first, which, although was a great and very helpful host, the prices were a little higher than I could afford or expect my parents to pay. In 2006 I moved to Surnaturelle and couldn't ask for more in a host. They're a wonderful, small company and the people are great. Prices aren't too bad either. ;)

This site, and web design in general, has been incredibly theraputic for me over the last four years. It's helped to take my mind off many unhealthy thoughts and things that had a negative impact on me. Of course, nothing is without fault and a lot of the time I've chosen to work on my site and be on the Internet instead of out socialising with friends, but I'm working on that.

You can see the superficial transitions that PrettyBloomers has been through at the designs page. Some rather unpretty sights mixed with some alright ones!

I'm not sure what the future for PrettyBloomers will be. In many ways I feel like she is coming to an end, that it's time to move on and try a different domain. At the same time I feel an attachment and love for what this site is, has been and might be, and I'm not so sure I want to say goodbye just yet.

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