Site History
Well, how did this all start? Well, I can't remember. (Did that surprise you?) But here's the story as well as I can remember it.
Sometime back in 2001, I went to the AnalogX site and downloaded SimpleServer. I set up a small site on my desktop computer with that, and there wasn't much on the site. Some of you may remember that site as having a white background and two rows of links, one on the top and one on the bottom of each page. There was a small Earth: 2025 section with strategies and stuff. I still have the strategy sheets that I made. Maybe you remember this definition of Will in the FFA Glossary: "ChInEsE -- A guy who farts a lot and likes foot sex. Former president of Red Alert."
Oh, I almost forgot. This was hosted off of a 14.4 kbps dialup connection at first, which was later "upgraded" to 40/28 kbps dialup connection that would automatically get disconnected every 8 hours.
Then a few months (maybe even a year, my memory fails me) later, in May 2002, my desktop computer died for some reason. The entire site was lost, and without any backups, that site went away. I left to go to China later that month, and after I came back in August, I tried putting up a site similar to the one that was up previously, but that didn't work because I had forgotten the content. So for a while, there was no site. Then in September 2002, I created a site from scratch. It looked pretty bad, but it began resembling what it looks like now. For one thing, the Got Rice Man was used as the background. Then in October or November, Charles offered to help make a layout, and this site still bears a strong resemblance to the original design. Thanks, Charles.
By this time, the site was being served from IIS on my desktop computer (the one I used to do homework, play games, etc). I didn't realize how bad of a combination this was. Even though IIS was an improvement over SimpleServer, the performance still sucked. In October, I got DSL. This made things much faster, though hosting the site on my desktop still bogged it down.
By the beginning of December, the site was still pretty empty. The link bar contained basically everything on the site: Home, Funny Stuff, AIM Convos, Chinglish, Hardware, Theorems, 3D Pong, Downloads, Search, FTP. And that ugly hit counter. There wasn't really anything else on the site at all. The funny quotes page was undoubtedly the most frequently accessed page (other than home, of course) for a few months.
I became fed up with running a server off my my desktop and so I moved everything to the lovely cardboard box (v1.0) in March. The transition was complete on March 21, 2003. Things loaded much more quickly.
Since March 2003, the site has expanded a lot. I added the Un-Xanga, which soon overtook the Funny page as the leader in page hits. Those pages about atheism, teachers, and other random stuff were also added.
December began an undesirable trend. Lots of Walton teachers began hearing about this site. Although Mr. Edelstein had known about the site and had read it long before, word had not spread until around this time. I had to censor some old stuff.
On January 16, 2004, the cardboard box v1.0 was retired. In its place is a newer server, which runs about four times as fast. It even has a real metal case, so no more cardboard =(.
Two months later, I stopped using icydog.d2g.com and switched to icydog.no-ip.com. The d2g had been free for several years, but they started getting greedy. I paid for two years and decided that that was enough. Later that month, the Un-Xanga was officially renamed to Zhanga. Thanks to Tim for the suggestion. I don't know why I never thought of it myself.
Sometime in 2004 or 2005, I introduced the Xanga Tracker which has been dutifully collecting data ever since. In November 2005, this site finally got a real domain name and became www.icydog.net. In March 2006, I switched this site from Windows/IIS to Linux (Fedora Core 4)/LAMP. I have freed myself from Microsoft tyranny! (Clarification for any Microsoft recruiters who may have found your way here: Just kidding... I can't afford Windows Server + MSSQL licenses.) Actually, I like coding on Linux better than on Windows, and setting up a webserver to interact with a database (this is where the comments and some other stuff is stored) is so much easier (and doesn't cost several hundred dollars).
So... here we are now. Since nobody reads any more, I only update the Zhanga now. The rest of the site now rarely changes.
Last updated February 9, 2007.
991 hits since March 31, 2006.
