Site History
Way back in 2001 when I was becoming an avid Pokémon fan, I started visiting Pokémon websites. I stumbled upon Pokemon.com by just typing in the URL and seeing if it existed - this was way back when it still had cheats. Ah, the good old days.
I did some internet searches for Pokémon sites later, and found some pretty bad ones. (Only one that ever engraved itself in my memory was one with a section called "CLICK HERE IF U HATE PIKACHU" that contained badly edited official pictures of Pikachu being killed by various other Pokémon like Beedrill and Arbok that really disturbed me since I considered Pikachu my favorite Pokémon at the time.) I only looked around them and then never visited them again. Well, I didn't know how to add websites to my favorites, anyway.
One day I came across a site called Mew's Hangout. It was far better than any of the other sites I had visited, and at the time located at http://www.mypokekitty.homestead.com. (That URL soon became the word I typed fastest after "Pokémon".) This site really inspired me, and it made me start dreaming of one day having my own website. (Mew's Hangout also became my first ever affiliate, but now it is down.) I started making up sections for it in my free time, even though I didn't have a clue how websites were created. I just thought them up and regularly went over what I had in my head again. I do that when I make stories too.
Well, then, sometime in late 2001, Dad started teaching me HTML. He had taught my brother a little bit long before; I don't really remember whether I asked him to teach me for the purpose of finally becoming able to make my Pokémon site or if he just started teaching me for the heck of it. I made a site in Icelandic about cats, and then started secretly making that Pokémon site of mine. The prototype (which never saw the light of the Internet) looked something like this, which should show you approximately how much I knew at the time. (This is just my recreation of it from memory, though.) The "Games" link back then took you to a page in the same format where you could pick "The Red and Blue versions", "The Yellow version", "The Gold and Silver versions" and later "The Crystal version" (from which I draw the conclusion that it must have been in late 2001, because I got Crystal that Christmas and I remember adding that link when I got Crystal). Once you clicked one of those links you would get a list with, for example, "Crystal version cheats", "Crystal version truth" and "Crystal version walkthrough". Yes, bad, I know. As you can see, the "Truth" thing was already one of this site's most important principles; those were actually the first sections I decided to make, mainly because all those bad websites I had visited in my early days had gotten on my nerves for their inaccuracy. (Hey, I'm a perfectionist.)
But well, I didn't actually write any sections yet. I forgot about my plans to make a Pokémon site for a while, partially out of laziness and partially because I vaguely realized that my site wasn't quite the quality of stuff like Mew's Hangout yet because I simply lacked the HTML knowledge and experience. But one day I decided I still wanted to do this, asked Dad how to make colors and a menu on the side, and created my first table layout. I made some sections, all with different eye-hurting background colors (I had no idea how to include the menu on every page so I didn't) and finally the site was launched on November 2nd 2002. I named it Butterfree's Pokémon Site - yeah, I was extremely unoriginal. It looked like this and was located at http://www.vilhjalmur.com/butterfree. (That URL will now just take you to the current site.) It also had horrid browser support, because at the time I didn't have the faintest idea what a browser was. I might note that for the heck of it, I later made an Oldie style which will make the current site look almost exactly like the site looked back then in all of its eye-hurting, unreadable glory.
I excitedly told everybody in the Mew's Hangout guestbook (which had turned into more of a chatroom than a guestbook - it was more or less my second home with all the fun people there, a couple of which I am still in contact with) about my new site, and everybody loved it. Whee, ego boost. I continued adding sections to the site, updating my fic, etc... the layout didn't change for a looooooong while, though. I added a splash page sometime - it had an animation of Charizard and Butterfree talking about not letting humans into their secret hideout (the start of that "our secret hideout" joke that's been frequently on the splash pages ever since). Those animations were actually sometimes pretty entertaining, even if the drawings were horrid...
When I first put that up, the site was still Butterfree's Pokémon Site; however, by doing some research at Archive.org and my old e-mail account, I've discovered that I appear to have changed it to The Cave of Dragonflies late in May 2003. I also made the second splash animation which was much worse in terms of graphics (for hell's sake, RESIZED SPRITES?) but slightly better in terms of content. (If you want to see the text of the splashes without looking at those horrible images, you can find it transcribed here.) So yeah. After I changed the splash, the front page looked like [WARNING: contains background music that can't be turned off!] this (admittedly those updates are from after I started to use SSI; I stuck them on there from another, newer copy of the site since this version didn't have any updates on it). There were 38 links on the menu at that time, which is more than twice what it started with.
On June 4th 2003 (the date might not be entirely accurate; I'm assuming it from looking at the date of the oldest post I could find, which is the first post of the ranks thread), I created the first forums. I used Conforums because the Pokemonicons forums, which I'm fairly sure were the only forums I went to at the time, used Conforums. (Later I strongly regretted that decision, because Conforums was one of the most featureless free hosted forums out there - I just didn't know of any other ones.) There are two trends started right at the beginning in the forum structure that I've followed ever since: firstly, having a forum to discuss the Pokémon games in general (I really do have a tendency to get ambitious because I've seen how other forums do something and think I could do it better; I did that exactly because it annoyed me how at other forums you always had to choose to make every topic relate to one specific set of games), and secondly, the Insanity forum where people can be random.
Then (August 27th, to be exact), I started to use SSI to include the menu on every page, and all the pages got the same background and everything rather than all of them being different. This [WARNING: contains background music that can't be turned off!] is what the front page looked like at this point. 41 links on the menu. On September 23rd, I furthermore started using ASP.NET to allow visitors to choose their music. Then the site looked like this. 50 links exactly on the menu at this point.
On the 25th, the site was moved to a dedicated server (which I generally refer to as "the London server") that Dad was using for his company's website - now I could play around with the site on his computer as I wanted without anything changing on the actual site. This server was also faster and capable of serving much more requests at a time, meaning the site stopped going down every time too many people direct linked my sprites at the Pokémasters forums (where I had a sprite request thread). On the same day, I also revived a feature of the original site called the Poll of the Week, except that this time I called it the Almighty Random Poll and started changing it, well, randomly. Oh, and this is also when I first started saving all my updates. Whee, no more guesswork about when I did what.
Sometime around Halloween I put up a Halloween splash, as seen here. Prior to that but after the second animation, I had been using this one. I actually ended up keeping the Halloween splash for a LOOOOONG while after Halloween, or to December 11th. Then I made what is in my opinion the best splash page I've ever had; it looked like this (although that particular copy is from after the styleswitcher came).
Now, the site's first birthday was rapidly approaching, and I decided I'd make something great to celebrate it. So with some help from Dad, I made a huge database of Pokémon information that became the Pokédex. I finished it on time despite some problems with accidentally deleting everything for the Hoenn Pokémon, but unfortunately this was when the London server first started misbehaving, and I didn't get to upload the update until the fourth of November instead of the second.
Then after I remade the layout using DIVs instead of tables and made the style switcher on December 17th, Cave Style looked like this. 66 links on the menu.
On December 29th, I got an e-mail from a Firebird (now Firefox) user, informing me that the layout looked messed up in it. That was when I first actually realized that the site looking fine in Internet Explorer did not necessarily mean at all that it would look good in other browsers. I downloaded Firebird, Opera and Netscape and fixed some CSS errors and box model misusages to make the site finally cross-browser after being operated for over a year. (I don't get why NOBODY complained until then.)
Now, in January 2004 I started making an HTML guide, and made a sample layout for it. To my frustration, I realized that this layout looked better than the layout I was using for the site itself. So I switched over, leaving Cave Style to look like this. There were 67 links on the menu when I made this layout - the bad thing was that it was a table, so in a way it was a step backwards after I had been using divs for a little while before.
In late January, the site reached 100,000 front page hits. I made an update about it, but found to my horror that I was unable to upload it. As I later explained in an announcement at the old forums after somebody made a thread about the site being dead:
You may have noticed that there haven't been updates on the main site for two months.
That does NOT mean the site is dead. I've probably been working harder over these two months than ever before on a period of this length apart from when I was just starting and getting my sections up. There is a new layout. There is a new style. Now you can choose the style and music without having to go to the splash page. Now they're cookied so you won't have to choose them each time you visit (but you can still change them and the cookies). Tons of new sections I've been gobbling up every day. Three new chapters of The Quest for the Legends. One or two chapters of The Type Chart. The site now uses completely valid HTML 4.01 and CSS 2 apart from a few Internet Explorer only features that do not disturb other browsers. So, what's the problem, you ask? Why aren't you seeing any new layout or new sections or valid HTML when you go to the site?
The answer: The server went stupid one day and I couldn't access it. No access means no uploading, no uploading means no updates on the site YOU see, although the site I see is packed with them.
Dad tried e-mailing the guy who runs this service over in London, but got no reply. In the end, he even went as far as contacting the guy who got them this service, and FINALLY that stupid administrator replied, and they're getting into it now. I don't know when I'll get access to the stupid server again, but it will be soon. And then there will be five new updates on the site...
I was completely unable to upload anything at all on my birthday. I felt very guilty for that; I had wanted to make a nice big update, but it turned out I couldn't make any update at all.
On February 26th I made this layout, after making the menus into divs again rather than tables. This copy in particular has 90 links on the menu. Cave Style, as you can see, was changed slightly; actually I made special banners for each layout before that happened. I was still unable to update.
Now, because I got a bit upset about the whole forum situation, finally thinking realistically and figuring that everybody would think the site was dead, I finally went ahead and bought the domain name that I had been toying with the idea of getting - www.dragonflycave.com. (www.caveofdragonflies.com was too long and annoying, and www.tcod.com was already taken, aside from not being an "official" abbreviation of the site's name yet.) This happened on March 7th 2004. Unfortunately this domain name has caused something very annoying: people thinking the site is called Dragonflycave. Just to clear that up, the site is called The Cave of Dragonflies and not Dragonflycave, Dragonfly Cave, Dragonflies Cave, Dragonfly's Cave or anything in that direction. "Dragonfly cave" implies a cave involving dragonflies, which is basically the same meaning as "The Cave of Dragonflies", just like how "the kitchen door" implies the door leading to the kitchen like "the door of the kitchen" would, and that is the only reason I decided I could use that for a domain name.
Anyway, we thought of making that domain name point to Dad's computer instead of the London server, which would allow those who access the domain to view the updated site. This was intended as a temporary solution, but in fact it stayed like that (with the London server, once back up, being at http://www.vilhjalmur.com/butterfree) until January 20th 2006, when my dad's computer broke down.
The first time I made a splash to "celebrate" a hit milestone as the mascots would have it was for 150,000 hits on May 28th 2004. I still really like that sweatdropping Charizard pic. Since then, nearly every splash has been celebrating a hit milestone and usually involved Charizard and Butterfree's frustration with the number of humans constantly pouring into their "secret" hideout.
The Invisionfree forums were created on June 19th 2004 and opened on June 21st. The old forums were still kept up, but registrations were disabled.
The site reached 200,000 front page hits during my vacation in Greece in early August 2004, which subsequently resulted in a not-so-good splash image.
Sometime in 2004 - I'm not sure when exactly - I realized fleetingly at some point that there were exactly 365 non-legendary Pokémon - I counted the legendary Pokémon and they were 21, and I happened to subtract that from 386 to find that convenient number that seemed to be just screaming to have one Pokémon assigned to each day of the year. This became the Zodiac on September 24th 2004, and it has been a distinguishing feature of the site since in the form of the unique date below the top banner.
On October 3rd 2004, I made the autumn splash, still one of my favorite splashes. That Charizard is just cute.
For the site's second birthday on November 2nd 2004, I intended to finish the walkthrough of FireRed and LeafGreen I had started, but I didn't manage to do it in time, and because I had been focusing on that, there was no actual birthday update. Oh well.
December 10th 2004 saw 300,000 front page hits and a Christmas-themed splash.
On February 27th 2005, I made the menu into a list in the HTML instead of the old series of divs and used CSS to make the links in the menu change background color when hovering over them, additionally making the links reach all the way from one edge to the other (the link used to end with the linked word before that). This also prompted me somehow to validate my HTML and CSS, finishing that on March the second. The site afterwards looked like this.
On April 8th 2005, the site reached 400,000 front page hits and got a new splash. August 12th made it 500,000 with a splash as well.
Now, to quote the update on September 21st 2005:
I'm making a new layout.
*hears audience gasp* Yup, it's true. I just randomly decided, "Hey, my site has ugly, messy HTML. I should redo it." So now a new layout is in the works, which will for example make the menu stretch if you adjust the font size on your browser, make the Cave of Dragonflies logo have text to replace it if images are turned off, and allow much more freedom for me in making styles. Fwee. As a side note, though, this will take a while as I'll have to completely remake the stylesheets for all the styles, so don't like expect it tomorrow or something.
I began the conversion of the site on October fifth, 2005, but it took quite a bit longer than I had planned (until February 8th 2006). That is the layout you will be looking at right now. The site's third birthday on November 2nd 2005 prompted me to create this new site history page.
In January I made a decision to buy myself forum software to install on my own server so I could modify it for additional features and such. I went for vBulletin, my very favorite forum software, bought it and got my dad to help me install PHP and MySQL on the London server so I could get the forums up. After that I had to install (and make) a heap of hacks to get it just how I wanted it, create all the styles and make images for them all, a long and tedious process that took a few months.
February 2006 saw the start of the Monthly Crossword, and on February 19th, the day after my sixteenth birthday, was the day The Cave of Dragonflies reached 600,000 front page hits and I put up a new splash that contained neither more nor less than the return of Magikarp (while Butterfree was watching a romantic sunset with a Nidoking - a reference to me and my boyfriend at the time, Nidokingu).
And finally all the effort paid off: on June 2nd 2006, the new forums were opened. Curiously, I only noticed after this that all three of my forums had been opened in June. o.o
On June 21st, I modified the splash page so that it is not mandatory viewing when you come to the site - it will only show up if you either came there from the menu or if you have no style cookie set. This decreased the importance of the splash page, to be sure, but it didn't stop me from continuing the now-tradition of making a new splash page for all hit milestones. The Cave of Dragonflies then reached 700,000 front page hits on the first of July 2006, which prompted yet another new splash, which is one of my very favorites.
On September 28th, 2006, three important things happened. Firstly, it was of course the release date of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl in Japan. Secondly, it was then that I first put up the Cave of Speculative Theories. And thirdly, that was when the site got to 800,000 front page hits, which of course sprouted another splash. The site's fourth birthday was on November 2nd 2006, which prompted me to release Spectrum style. November was otherwise pretty much updateless as I spent it writing Scyther's Story for NaNoWriMo - a story of over 32,000 words written in a single month. Well, it was supposed to be 50,000, but whatever.
On December 28th, 2006, the site finally reached 900,000 front page hits, only three months (exactly) after 800,000. I also then organized the Old Updates into pages, which makes looking through history that much easier, and started automatically logging hit milestones to a file, which will make it enormously easier to research the hit progression in the future. On January 4th 2007, I added custom 404 error pages, which had never been on the site before; on January 10th I put up the splash for 900,000 front page hits.
The most important hit milestone yet, one million front page hits, was reached on February 15th 2007; only two days had passed since 990,000, and only a month and a half since 900,000. The splash made for the occasion is one of my favorite splashes ever, just because it's silly and humourous and fun.
A million and a half front page hits were reached on January 31st 2008, some 50 weeks after the million. That averages to 10,000 front page hits every week. Nice. The splash made for this occasion had been pre-coded (only the day before, although I never expected the milestone to be reached so soon, because at that time there were already some 15,000 front page hits to go) to appear the moment the hit counter got to a million and a half, so there was no wait for that.
Who knows what the future will bring for the site? Only time will tell.
Page last modified August 16 2008 at 04:11 GMT
