Update

11/02/22: Twenty years

Two decades of you
and we're nowhere near through.
Happy birthday, dear website!
Still so much to do.

The Cave of Dragonflies is twenty years old today! That's a hell of a milestone and I'm very proud of it.

For the occasion, I of course did something no one asked for. It has been bothering me for years now that the site had two sets of styles - the new ones, built with modern technologies and mobile compatibility and so on, and the old ones, which were kludgy on phones, sported absurdly tiny font sizes and barely-existent spacing, and were often only updated to support new features as an afterthought. One possible way to deal with this would have been to remove them, but I never like the idea of removing anything, they were a source of more variety in presentation, and also... they were just kind of nostalgic for me, and probably other people who used to visit the site back in the day when they were kids, too.

So, twentieth anniversary? Good time for nostalgia. I have now remade all the old styles. I did this very conservatively this time around - adding mobile compatibility, increasing the impossibly small font size (every time I looked at the old styles it was somehow even smaller than I remembered it), having some semblance of spacing, some other small tweaks, but carefully keeping the original aesthetic of each intact, as charmingly dated as they are. The goal I had in mind was, basically, that if you visited this site in 2007 and used a style, you should be able to switch to the new version of it now and think, "Wow, it's just like I remember it!" (It isn't, the font sizes were truly made for ants, but the overall effect should be identical.)

I think it went pretty well, but let me know if you bump into any oddities in any of the old-new styles.

As a bonus, I also made an attempt to make the menus slightly less janky on mobile. It's still kind of janky, but I truly hate working around mobile quirks and this was about as much of it as I could take.

Happy birthday to a beautiful relic of the old internet! There's more content I'm hoping to get to soon (PLA catch mechanics/calculator would be good to get up before Scarlet and Violet come out), but this is the silly little anniversary update I wanted and I'm very happy about getting it done.

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lolita
Commenting on: 11-02-22

thank you so much for keeping this site up: the joy i felt rediscovering it was like reuniting with an old friend, and i'm so glad it's still here.

[18/12/2022 10:08:30]

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Comments

My own messages will be signed as Butterfree, with the Admin label below my name. If someone signs as Butterfree without that label, it's probably not me.

Pages: 1

lolita
Commenting on: 11-02-22

thank you so much for keeping this site up: the joy i felt rediscovering it was like reuniting with an old friend, and i'm so glad it's still here.

» Reply to this [18/12/2022 10:08:30]
Bubble
Commenting on: 11-02-22

Ooh it's so neat that you went through so much effort to preserve the old styles, wowie! I usually come here for the favourite picker nowadays but I get nostalgia from pages I don't even remember remembering until I wander over to it again, and the choice of layout super-extra adds to the whole vibe. I'm really glad you've been around so long!

» Reply to this [16/12/2022 18:05:15]
Grimdour
Commenting on: 11-02-22

Congrats on 20 years, and outlasting so many social media sites! And most businesses!

Your work on this site and the forums shaped me as a person, thank you.

Here's to more of tea, cod and Pokémon ♥️

» Reply to this [11/12/2022 04:18:25]
anon
Commenting on: 11-02-22

Waiting excitedly for gen 9 pokemon in the pokemon picker :)

» Reply to this [30/11/2022 22:19:06]
Story
Commenting on: 11-02-22

I have stumbled across this site every once in a while since I was a child, so it makes my heart feel quite soft to see that it's been 20 years and counting now. Happy belated birthday TCoD! Thank's for sticking it out for this long <3

Hope everyone has fun with Scarlet and Violet this weekend! Happy hunting o7

» Reply to this [17/11/2022 05:21:05]
Butterfree
Admin
Website: The Cave of Dragonflies
Commenting on: 11-02-22

I did it for people like you, anon!

(And thank you all for the well-wishes!)

» Reply to this [12/11/2022 18:08:13]
anon
Commenting on: 11-02-22

The updated styles are lovely but I'm glad you haven't removed the old ones. I'm using 8pt single-spaced Torkoal lava style until the site shuts down or until I need glasses.

» Reply to this [12/11/2022 12:49:20]
Chaos
Commenting on: 11-02-22

Happy website birthday!

» Reply to this [12/11/2022 04:20:20]
Sed
Commenting on: 11-02-22

I have been coming here since 2005, and I know my Pokémon skills have become rusty when I couldn't name three of them in a row to clear the check.

Nevertheless, a Happy Belated Birthday to TCoD. Most websites have succumbed to the temptation to use cookie-clutter templates, but I am happy my favourites, TCoD, Serebii and Dogasu's Backpack, have not.

Here's a virtual cake to the cave! 🍰

» Reply to this [07/11/2022 19:54:40]
Bob
Commenting on: 11-02-22

Happy twentieth, TCoD! It's always comforting to know that at least one of the websites that was so near and dear to my little kid heart is still trucking. Hope the next twenty are just as fun!

» Reply to this [02/11/2022 21:58:46]
Negrek
Website: Thousand Roads
Commenting on: 11-02-22

Eyyy, happy birthday to TCoD! It's wild to think that it's been twenty years, although I haven't been around for all of it. When you mentioned you were working on a nostalgic update, I wondered if it might have something to do with styling… very appropriate! And it must have been a load of work, too. Props on putting all of this together.

It's been a lot of fun flipping through styles I remember from long ago. Hellfire is so very not a modern style, lol, I love it. Torkoal is perhaps a dark horse fave of mine; very pleasing color palette, I think–very calm.

Thanks for all the memories and best of luck on twenty more years! I can't wait to see what's coming in the future. PLA catch mechanics sounds intriguing; I'm curious how those end up being different than mainline in practice!

» Reply to this [02/11/2022 13:42:53]

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Page last modified April 22 2025 at 00:18 UTC