Site History

From humble newbie beginnings to still slight armature present, Ichabod1799.net has had its fair share of historic dramas and adventures in all part of growing up. Many sites have shared similar conflict and closed down unnecessarily too soon, this page goes to show when things seem dark and hopeless, don't give up too easily, hang in there. Continue reading (if interested) this documentation of how Ichabod1799 became what it is over the past five years.

Origins

What began as an addiction to Geocities and their Page Builder feature burst into a part time hobby, which included making wallpapers (well more like slapping images together in a basic photo manipulation program) for the popular Buffy Australian fan site. (Buffy.com.au which is now closed down and replaced by a discussion board, Whedionists.) These very first wallpapers made were titled "Ghosts of the Desert" and "She Saved the World a lot".

Back then the site went by the lame name of "Totally Blasphem" and renamed later to "Shrine of Shadow." It was used to display the Buffy fan wallpapers but also featured poems, scary stories, java effect tutorials (such as changing a scroll bar colour - which seemed to be all the rave back then) and a collection of midis.

Not long after the site split into two creating the worse decision ever: "Realm of Death, Angel of Death." This new site mainly featured ghost stories and emo poetry. Shrine of Shadow split again devoting a whole site dedicated to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Due to a vicious web (and physical) fight with some classmates, this new web franchise had to be ditched and begin all over again in secret, thus Ichabod1799 was created.

Ichabod1799

Ichabod1799 was first launched the 23rd of September 2003. Still hosted on Geocities but straying away from Page Builder to first learn about HTML coding after using its first two layouts from Day Dream Graphics. Though not happy with the limited range of themes in an anime dominated industry it seemed to make sense to try designing layouts. First it started with a Buffy one for Day Dream Graphics then making a Jet Set Radio Future Pop-up/Frame layout for Ichabod1799 itself in January 2004. Since then the site now featured pre-made layouts as well as wallpapers (which were still being produced,) poems, stories and midis.

Eventually with the more content being added and with most of Shrine of Shadow being transferred over, the site was growing too big for the small space Geocities only allowed. Getting sick of the ridiculous advertisements too and the pop-ups it was time to search for a new free host, but the quest was long and when it seemed hopeless it found Kylosa.

Kylosa was a dream come true, decent amount of space, professional like features such as PHP compatible and best of all no adds. Ichabod1799 felt at home but unfortunately so did many others who took advantage of Kylosa's hospitality.

It seems people used Kylosa as a means of uploading and downloading illegal content and soon the webmaster pulled the plug and the whole server was deleted. Without any warning so many sites had been lost including this one. That was the sign saying to bite the bullet, and the decision was made to pay for hosting and a domain name.

Domain

April 2006 was when Ichabod1799 was finally settled in the one place with a professional hosting package giving the site lots of room to grow and its own domain name [dot] net. With the help of the community the site was back functioning better than before, until Friday the 11th of August the place was hacked and everything deleted off the server, except just an index page posted by the hacker with their tag on it. With the help of the staff members at Digital Pacific they were able to quickly determine how the site got hack into and installed some new features to stop it from happening again. The site was then restored (luckily everything is backed up) but the only thing that was lost was one review.

Ichabod1799 was getting a bit too big for its boots with its many other non graphic based features such as the rants section which included things like tutorials but also mainly rants. It was something it was criticized for, and so after a busy intense year of 2008, it was time for another fresh start and the place was cleaned up and more organized to focus on just the graphics, introducing a whole blog sub division for the rants.