History
A History of Fishstick Heaven
My first website started with some teach yourself HTML book back in my sophomore year of high school, in late 1999. It consisted entirely of the tutorial pages from that book, and was hosted out of the My Documents folder on my 200 MHz Pentium with 80 MB of RAM, a 4 GB hard drive, and no internet access whatsoever. True, it was pretty pointless to have a website that nobody else could see, but it was one of the coolest things I had learned recently, so I was excited. However cool the tutorial pages were, though, they weren't mine. At the beginning of 2000, I began work on what would eventually become my current website.
Still glowing with excitement from my newfound skill, I spent many free periods in my high school's computer lab and cobbled together a green-on-black monstrosity of a website that used the marquee tag for the title and some random JavaScript script that I'd downloaded to make some text follow the cursor. It was a hideous website. Luckily for me, it was only seen by people I showed it to; I still had nowhere to host it, so it ended up being hosted on a 3.5" floppy disk so I could work on it both at school and home.
Using someone else's JavaScript code on my site just wouldn't do, though. I taught myself JavaScript from some web tutorial and began working on the second version of my site, which I titled Paul Bogard's Non-Amygdalaceous Website.
Of course, using my own JavaScript didn't make the site any better. I had such "cool" features as a JavaScript prompt that popped up when you loaded the page, which accepted the visitor's name and then proceeded to scroll a welcome message to them in the status bar of the browser. At least the dark red and tan color scheme I had was slightly better than my previous version, but it was still a pretty bad site.
I finally realized the error of my ways and dropped the annoying JavaScript features for the next version of my site. This one simply used an included JavaScript file to create the menu common to each page so I would only have to update the menu once whenever I added a new page. Soon, I added a few JavaScript-run mad libs as well. The site was still hosted exclusively on either a floppy disk or whatever computer I happened to be working on at the time; eventually, I put it in a shared folder on one of the lab computers so I'd only need to use a floppy disk if I wanted to work on the site at home.
In the spring of 2000, I was given a copy of Active Server Pages for Dummies, and taught myself to use ASP and set up PWS on my home computer and one of the lab computers. ASP was great; I could do proper include files and I didn't have to bother with JavaScript. I could even do some simple database stuff by having ASP interact with a Microsoft Access database.
I began my Junior year of high school with a functional ASP/Access-based website. I had a simple guestbook that I'd written, I'd converted the Mad Libs to ASP, and all was good. In honor of the switch to ASP, I renamed my site to Paul Bogard's Non-Ichthyophagous Website. The only sticking point was that my site still wasn't avalable publicly anywhere. Sure, I had PWS on both home and school computers, but my home computer didn't even have a modem, and the school's network was set up such that I couldn't see my website from outside of the school's network.
So on 10 October 2000, I signed up for free hosting on Brinkster. It worked well for my site; I had a few megabytes of space with no ads, and I could use ASP and Access. Soon, I found a free domain name redirect, and PaulBogard.com was born. (The free redirect stuck my page in a frame with an ad at the bottom, but I implemented a frame-killer JavaScript script to get around that.)
Having a website was great. The majority of my peers were just barely able to use the web outside of AOL, and almost none of them had a website. I could do school projects as a website, and the novelty of that format seemed to impress some of my teachers enough that I was able to pull off a higher grade than the project's content should have allowed. I got out of a lot of group work in one particular class because I was working on the class's website. It was just a simple thumbnail-displaying photo album site, but apparently the teacher thought it was a great deal of work.
By the end of my Senior year, my website had added an interactive choice-based story and some dumb relationship rater. It had a bunch of odd links. I had learned just enough Flash to be dangerous, and for a few months it had a Flash splash screen until I regained some sense.
I graduated high school in 2002 and went on to college at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology with a website and the moniker "Fishsticks" that I'd recently picked up from an unfortunate incident involving frequent name changes a bowling score computer.
Freshman year brought a great deal of CounterStrike and Warcraft III, which solidified Fishsticks as my online presence. I discovered video game emulators and started playing EarthBound again, one of my favorite games for the Super Nintendo. Searching for tips led me to Starmen.Net, and I established a forum account there as Fishsticks. The name was here to stay.
The site got a reasonable number of updates during that year, although most of them were school-related. I added a page dedicated to screenshots of Maple, the mathematics software that we all loved to hate, behaving weirdly. I put up a page quotes by me and my friends. We established a CounterStrike server, and I created a few pages for that. Any time I created a website for a class project, it got dumped onto PaulBogard.com. RHIT did provide 100 MB of space to host a website on their server, but they supported only PHP, so I left my ASP-based site on Brinkster and simply tossed up a redirect on my RHIT webspace.
In the summer of 2003, a teacher from my former high school commissioned my friend Brian and me to create a website to display her artwork for sale. We spent the summer and put together an ASP/Access-based catalog site. This site was the best-looking site I'd worked on at the time, mainly because the teacher knew what she wanted it to look like and had much more creativity and skill in visual arts than I. It was also hosted on Brinkster, although the free domain redirection service I used for PaulBogard.com was no longer available, so she had to pay for her domain name. This project started to teach me that I needed to get away from Access; it had enough power for what we were expecting it to do, but even with the relatively small site we needed to come up with several awkward workarounds to get it to work properly.
Early in my sophomore year, I decided to teach myself PHP. I'd heard some people saying they prefered it over ASP, and I could host it on my school-provided web space, so it seemed like it would be good to learn.
Apparently I made the choice at just the right time. In October, Brinkster announced that they would begin placing ads on their free sites. This was not totally unexpected; I had considered myself lucky to have a free site without ads. Nonetheless, I didn't really want ads on my site, so I worked harder at learning PHP, and began to convert some of my ASP code into PHP.
I ran into a brick wall fairly quickly. I didn't want to use Access databases anymore, but several parts of my site required a database. I checked with RHIT, but apparently they did not have any sort of database available for general student use.
Considering my options, I realized that Rose-Hulman had a specific naming scheme for computers on its network, based username and the order the computer registered. Thus, I effectively had a static rose-hulman.edu subdomain. So when I went home for winter break, I brought back my old 200 MHz Pentium. I tossed Windows 2000 onto it and set up IIS, PHP and MySQL, and I had a server with a database. It wasn't an ideal machine by any means, but my website wasn't exactly drawing a lot of hits, and it was certainly better than having to use Access. A side advantage of this setup was that ASP would work as well, so I was able to move my existing site off of Brinkster and onto my server immediately, rather than waiting until the PHP version was done. Brian also moved America Airways, his virtual airline website hosted on Brinkster, to this server.
By March of 2004, I had my site converted to PHP, complete with a new design and a new name: Paul Bogard's Fishstick Heaven. The databases were working well for the simple stuff that I'd previously done with Access, but I wanted a new project to more fully utilize the better database I now had.
The idea for my next project came to me while I was playing EarthBound. One of my sophomore year roommates had a Super Nintendo, so earlier in the school year I had gotten away from emulation by buying a used copy of the game. I decided a good database project would be a catalog of items and enemies in EarthBound. Starmen.Net, the largest EarthBound fansite by that time, didn't have such a catalog. I decided to complete my project and get it accepted to the Links page of Starmen.Net.
Summer break came around, and I couldn't keep my server at RHIT over the summer, so we put it in a closet at Brian's house over the summer. I set up my RHIT-hosted site to point to the temporary summer address, and Brian did the same with his Brinkster address.
Development on my EarthBound catalog project, which I dubbed the EarthBound Database, or EBDB, was progressing well. By the summer I was feeling pretty comfortable with PHP and MySQL, so Brian and I decided to convert his aging site to use those technologies.
We weren't done with the conversion by the end of summer break, but we did decide that we might want to do more websites on commission, so we agreed to split the cost of a hosting package at Fuitadnet, named ourselves Cycloid Studios, and registered cycloidstudios.net. I moved Fishstick Heaven and the EBDB to cycloidstudios.net immediately. America Airways couldn't be moved until we'd finished converting it to PHP, so I brought the server back to RHIT.
The first week of my junior year, I had EBDB pretty much working. It now featured items, enemies, PSI powers, and shops. I previewed it to a few Starmen.Net people, and then formally announced it on the Starmen.Net forums on 5 September 2004. The reception to this project was incredible. I expected a few people to say it was cool; instead, I got a Site Spotlight and an invitation to help Starmen.Net with their (almost-complete) site redesign.
In the meantime, I noticed that Fuitadnet's monthly bill was missing from my credit card. Apparently they forgot to bill me after the inital payment, so I was effectively getting a site and domain again for no monthly fee.
Development on Fishstick Heaven went on hold for a while. I was excited to be helping out with Starmen.Net, and in addition, Brian and I were finishing up America Airways' conversion and move to Cycloid Studios. In October, I built myself a new computer, and in November, I began playing Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft, and any free time I would have spent working on Fishstick Heaven went to playing those games.
Throughout 2005, WoW started taking up more and more of my free time. I was no longer playing casually. I made a website for a joke WoW guild some friends and I created and hosted it on Cycloid Studios, but didn't do any real work on Fishstick Heaven. Over the summer, I joined a raiding guild, and soon my WoW time could be measured in hours per night pretty much any night. So my senior year at RHIT I was working two part time jobs, playing WoW enough to be a part time job, and balancing a reasonable school course load. I didn't have a whole lot of free time or motivation to work on Fishstick Heaven. What little website work I did do was for my WoW guild's website, and Cycloid Studios essentially became a place for me to dump WoW screenshots and videos.
At the end of August, two years after I'd originally signed up on Fuitadnet, I tried to access Cycloid Studios and found it was gone. Apparently Fuitadnet had finally figured out that they hadn't been billing me. It didn't disappoint me too much at the time, as I hadn't been updating my sites anyway; my biggest regret was that I'd lost a lot of random files I'd been hosting there that I'd been stupid enough not to back up.
Nothing much changed until October of 2006, when I finally managed cut back my World of Warcraft. Now that I had free time again, I started work on re-releasing the present version of Fishstick Heaven, opening it on 15 January, 2007.