About
About me
Seeing as that’s what people usually expect on an ‘about’ page… hi, I’m me, and this will be the small bit about me.
About this blog
This blog is my personal little corner of the site which has been online since mid 2001. The blog part you’re looking at started life in 2003 as an example blog on b2evolution, a fork of b2, like WordPress as well. Evolution was at the time way ahead in terms of multi-user support, and seeing as I wanted to offer blog services to our members I chose that and decided to post a few examples. Fast forward a few years and we ditched b2evolution for WordPressMU and I split my own blog off to a standalone WordPress installation. When I posted those first few test examples I didn’t have any urge to really start blogging, it took a lot of time to finally catch the bug. And even now I’m bouncing all over the place without any set topic. I just like the fact that it’s mine and I can post whatever the hell is on my mind.
Oh, and I love comments. Hint hint.
About this site
In a nutshell, this site’s about everything and nothing that is (or has been) of interest to me (and other people involved in posting here).
So that means everything from computer topics and news, to anime, photography, music, Final Fantasy, mixed with personal happenings and lots of photos.
It’s my online presence / dumping ground.
Contact
If you want to contact me you can get a hold of me by using this contact form.
Or you can add me on the following networks and give me a poke there:
Site history
Seeing as I still repeatedly get asked what the site is about or why we have such a random range of topics or what the motto “Just cruisin’” is supposed to mean, a brief overview of how this place came to be:
Once upon a time in a galaxy far away… there was a guy, let’s call him XIII, who liked dabbling with html and making web designs. Somewhere in the year 2001 he got bored with plain html and after reading some stuff about PHP decided that this would be fun to play with, so he went and created an account at the freebie site f2s.com. A basic looking frame was created and the coding began. But alas, you get what you pay for and after 2 weeks the frustration of a slow loading site which was down half the time pushed said person to sign up for a paid host. A thousand new options were now within reach and all was good. A new layout quickly went online and the basic site was there, still with the only purpose: fiddling around with PHP.
A little while later I came in touch with Edgar of Avalanche Online through the webhost’s (at the time) forum and after mailing back and forth about technical issues I decided to join the forum as per his request. I joined, posted a bit here and there and raised a few questions and gave a few suggestions regarding how the site was managed and before I knew it I was moderator, then supermoderator and eventually co-admin. Go figure.
Meanwhile my own site was still my own little experiment, with Corvo joining in as we tried out new stuff noone knew about or looked at. Until, after checking out a lot of scripts in different other categories, I decided to install a PHP based forum to see how it worked and maybe have a laugh with some friends. The forum (phpBB 1.4) was installed, a mail sent out to a handful of personal friends and the few of us started posting (in Dutch).
Here’s where things got off track (and they really haven’t been back ON track since ;) because through the wonders of linkage some people of the aforementioned AO signed up and started posting as well, some in Dutch, some in English. For whatever reason they liked the laidback nonsense the few of us had made a handful threads about (mostly common interests and daily happenings), and they told others to check it out.
So by the end of 2001 phpBB2.0 was released and I decided to start the forum anew from scratch, based on this new version. People signed up again, more and more, and subforums got added as time went by based on the amount of posts for a specific topic. As such the thing sort of took on a life of its own none of us had anticipated. Best example of this is when Corvo got his XBox modded and made a thread about it going all whee. Some else asked a question about it, he answered it, and so a few threads were started about the whole DIY modding. Pretty soon, through the wonders of Google, more people found their way to the forums and we had to give it a seperate subforum because we were getting flooded by people looking for help and information. At the height of the whole modding hype over 30000 people a month found their way here looking for just that info.
We added a chatroom in 2002 to play around with IRC and have a common meeting ground for the people of AO, FFMO and X111, as well as a gallery where people could upload their photos and drawings and the site started looking more and more like a proper site and less like a coding experiment.
People posted about anime; we added an anime subforum with Kaitou and Darknight ZO kicking off the review section which has since then grown into one of the biggest content sections of the site. So basically, the only answer we can give you to the question what the site is about is; anything you want it to.
Ah yeah, the motto… I think it was somewhere in 2003 during one of the (totally random) moments in our site’s history where noone seemed to post Corvo and I were discussing the situation and wondering what we could do about it. Basically our conclusion was to just go about our business and post as usual (people were still reading it by the thousands after all) when Corvo jokingly suggested we should use “Just cruisin’” as motto. So basically it simply means we’re all here to kick back and relax and post about what’s going on and about what interests us.
Some of the old layouts for nostalgia’s sake:
- Blog layout 01 – winter
- X111.com – layout 1
- X111.com – layout 2
- X111.com – layout 3
- X111.com – layout 3 – splash page 1
- X111.com – layout 3 – splash page 2
- X111.com – layout 4
- X111.com – layout 5
- X111.com – layout 6