:: RainbowBliss.net ::

about rainbowstar / rainbowbliss

This is the story of RbS, including RainbowStar and RainbowBliss. Written by Elie.

Before RainbowStar

Well, I started making websites about a month after I got the internet. I've had a computer since 1996(not the same one) but I only got the internet in mid 2003. RbS began in October 2004, however I "officially" opened it on the 1st of September 2005.

My friend (who I met in primary school, but now we go to different high schools) told me about neopets and I became addicted to it.

Then I realised that you can edit things around the site that relate to your account. After viewing many lookups I noticed many banners of backgrounds, music etc. from websites. The most popular one by far was starlightmks.com. I decided to have a look at some of the sites and I was really interested in them. However, there was not as many as there is now.

I noticed how popular all these sites were and decided that I want to make one. I started with a freewebs site. It was called neopetsfansreststop or something, which I made in 2003 or 2004. I gave up on it because freewebs was so confusing and slow.

Then I made a site in bravenet.com and I THOUGHT it was going ok, but none of the graphics were original and I didn't know much about designing a website. Also, nobody was visiting it. I just kept refreshing the page until the counter reached 100 and pretended it wasn't me and got happy about it. Lol. After that I put off making a website for a while. (Which was from the end of 2003 till the begining of 2004.)

A few weeks later i discovered what the 'view source' button does (i'm not going to tell you about it cause then you'll just steal from my site, but most people know about it anyway). With my new knowledge, I went to starlight and figured out that it was made using frames. Simple enough, but now I needed to find a new web host with no ads. I went looking through web host guides on the internet and finally found one. After a while of using them, to my disapointment, they introduced ads so i went looking for another one. After hours of looking I found another perfect one.

RainbowStar

I immediately deleted previous failing sites and began working on my new site. Perhaps the hardest part was thinking of a name. I had ideas of using blue, leaf, star, shine, bright, neo, rainbow, bliss, etc. Then my sister suggested Rainbow Star. I liked it so I chose that.

My new website was rainbowstar.something.com. I didn't like this. I thought of using .tk, but that has an ad. Then i found .co.nr and that was perfect for me. Back then, .co.nr was not as popular as it is today, so it was a pain trying to find it, however the signup process used to be easier and practially any domain you wanted was available. After all that, the host also introduced ads (and started to be infected with viruses), so i went searching again. After searching for ages, I found that only sites that use an FTP client were good for me. So I learnt how to use FTP. After that I found out that optusnet (my ISP) allows me to use FTP, so it was right under my nose the whole time but I still wasted heaps of time searching.
Anyway, that was it for RainbowStar. I finally decided to stop wasting my time with stupid free hosts and stupid free domains which always went down, so I decided to get paid hosting.

RainbowBliss

We got paid hosting for images (for a year) with photobucket on 28 July 2006. That was a bad idea. Don't ever pay to use photobucket, just use their free hosting.
We bought paid hosting on the 1st of August 2006, as well as the domain rainbowbliss.net with a host that was called Pixelled Solutions because they had cheap plans and they gave a domain name with the plans (RainbowBliss has since moved hosts about twice).
The HARDEST thing I ever did in designing a website was thinking of a name. I wanted to keep RainbowStar, however all of the doamins except rainbow-star.org were taken. If you're not taking me seriously, I'd rather be stuck and completely confused in some HTML code rather than trying to think of another name again!
I also learnt SSI layout coding to try and make a nicer layout, as all of the previous layouts were made using frames.
In 2007 I completely reorgnised all of the pages for the site and made a new navigation menu, which made it easier for people to find the pages they were looking for :) Check out the previous layouts page to see the changes.
Well, thats about it for now!