About lady-chani.net

Current Site

• hosting: clavis-sama.com (specifically for TCG trade posts/TCG's. lovely host)
• built with: Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 & handcoding
• picture editor: GIMP (for what little editing I did)
• current layout image: vampire killer image gallery
• layout: # 8 - Eclipse, featuring Soma Cruz of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow/Dawn of Sorrow.

Webmistress

• Real Name: Jessica
• Online Alias: Chani
• Age: 23
• DOB: November 16
• Zodiac: Scorpio, Ox
• Location: Denver, Colorado

History

I have had a presence on the internet since... at least fall of 2002, I'm guessing November based on modification dates on the pages (which is how I'll be working my timeline for the rest of this story). I don't accurately have records of when I started playing around at being a webmistress. I know it happened during my high school years when I was bored out of my mind from classes not challenging enough. 2002 would place you at my sophomore year, which seems correct. I started playing at having a website because of Trading Card Games and other things that required you to have a website, such as Cliques and Fanlistings. So, I started up a website on a Geocities name. At that point, my corner of the net was literally called Lady Chani's Little Corner. My first layout was downloaded from Lycentia's SM Graphics, and had what I considered to be an awesome piece of Ah! My Goddess music looping continually in the background. The layout is still very pretty, and quite useful, being an iFrame/Tables conglomerate. Very simplistic for a first-time web-girl.

I'm not sure why I stopped using that layout, but in December of 2002, I changed it to v.2 Rose Fantasy. I downloaded this layout from a place called Breeze Graphics, which no longer exists. It also is still quite pretty in my eyes, even if my unexperienced self did ruin a perfectly good layout. Or maybe that's from viewing it in Mozilla. *shrugs* I certainly don't know on that. You can see from the screen shot that I was going full out in my quest to play these pretty little TCG's. I don't even like Sailor Moon all that much, you know. >>;;;; There's 32 total links to pages of TCG's, 24 of which I actually had cards for and played in. I'd say a quarter of them I really cared about. That quarter.... well, I wish they still existed. I would go join them again for sure.

Unlike the last layout, this one was a DIV layout. For a beginning webmistress who knew very little about coding, that made life a pain in the ass. So, in January of 2004, I switched back to a tables/iFrame mix from Aetheriality. It also used CSS. I called it Lady Chani's Card Corner, but to me, it's v.3 of the Little Corner. If you look closely at the screen shot, you'll see that the page doesn't even have the text changed from the default directions on how to use the layout. That's because I gave up on TCG's about this point. I was due to graduate in June and didn't have the time to spend playing with pixels. I didn't know for sure whether I was going to graduate or not, even, but I still had to work at it. Also around this time, a couple of my longstanding favorite games (Fusion Halo, Forever Lovers, I think one other...) stopped updating or went under. There was little reason to stick around, and I forgot about things. I'd had a Livejournal since January of 2003, so that became my only link to the people I'd befriended in the TCG community and to the internet in general.

I did graduate from high school, on time with my class that June of '04, though at several points I'd known I wasn't going to. Because of that, I didn't start college until spring of 2005. I had very little scholarship money for classes, and no job to support myself in, so I took classes that appealed to me. I know that semester I took a class in beginner ASL, a basic theatre class, and a webdesign class. It was teaching webdesign through Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004. Slowly but surely, my interest in the internet piqued, and I'd once again made a personal website, this time on the school's server, figuring that I'd manage to find a job and keep that space on the server for a while. This time, my website was called Insanity Squared, a phrase I'd used as a company for places that needed it on cards and the like. This was officially the first design for Insanity Squared, but it's the fourth rendidtion of my site. That's why it says v.1, but I call it v.4 all the time. It's also the first design I'd ever made, thus why it is so simple. It's tables & CSS, if you're interested. With a place for a website, I once again gravitated back to the ultimate online timewaster: TCG's. I found one. I kept myself to just the one. I was very active in the one.

Then, disaster struck. My money for college ran out and I had not yet found a job to pay for my schooling on my own. I swiftly transferred my website back to the old stand by (Geocities) and found it loathable to my FTP-accustomed self. I attempted to keep on, but the TCG changed, somehow, and I was tired of updating through Geocites. I told them I'd keep on, but eventually let it die. I figured that would be the end of the matter, even though throughout the years I still wished for a domain of my own.

One day in January of 2007, I was reading my Livejournal, when I came across the most extraordinary post. I was friended to Calico (the owner of SCM & creator of the TCG), and she posted that she was bringing back SCM. I resisted. Heavily. Soon after, though, I gave in. I recreated Insanity Squared on Geocities, using a layout I'd downloaded ages ago from Kali's Web Shoppe (now just Web Shoppe) that I heavily edited from it's original dark blues to the black, gold & red you see there to the left. I'd gotten good at CSS coding, as well as graphic manipulation through some semi-professional webmistressing on for a local video rental store (now closed), a local Japanese animation festival, and a local murder mystery improv comedy group. I attempted to diversify my website past just TCG's, but soon gave up. My website seems to revolve around TCG's, so why change it now?

After a time on Geocities, I started searching for a free hosting service that let me FTP and found the ueuo.com service. It sounded good, despite the ads, but I soon found out how annoying and frustrating it was. I was once again searching for a new host, a search soon eliminated by the kindness of Rahenna. She saw my griping on my front page and offered space on her clavis-sama.com domain, which she uses specifically for TCG trade posts and TCG-hosting. Since that's all my website is, she was willing to host my site. I then changed to my sixth layout in commemoration, a handmade Tables/Iframes layout that I had also recolored from it's original greyscale colorization, and once again renamed my site. I'd decided recently that for professional purposes, if I ever truly got a domain, a name that had the word 'insanity' in it might not be my best choice. Thus why it now reads lady-chani.net, as that will be the domain I aquire if I ever manage it.

I created a white & pink layout with accents of brown as a celebration of my website's freedom. I made it easy to update, but I knew there was something to make it easier. I eventually caught on to the idea of PHP includes. I slowly managed to figure it out and made the switch. Things ran well for a nice long time. Then in February of 2008, I put my entire site, and my life, on hiatus so that I could go up into northern Michigan to take care of my grandmother. It was just a simple thing, which was lucky for me, as I was moving to Colorado in late March. Once I was in Colorado, I got struck with the need to work for a living, and slowly forgot about my website. By the time I remembered it, courtesy once again of SCM, it was April of 2009. So, once again, I reinserted myself into the world of TCG's, and my long-neglected website.