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History

The past

Chapter 1 - Origins

1989. Internet was invented the very same year as I was born , and every day since I then found the Internet I longed to create the perfect site, maybe this is fate? But I believe I have finally found the path … to Burger King . It’s a long way from where we live, our house isn’t really located in the middle of the city ya know?

Anyhow, I started Cyberdyze in March year 2004. Back then I called it The Cyberdevil's Domain, since Cyberdevil was my alias on the Internet and my site was my domain, where I let loose my creative creativity and wrote down my thoughts. At first it was all about me, I uploaded my flash animations and wrote everything I knew about myself and a lot more. Then I suddenly got the amazingly stupid idea to make a huge flash portal, just like Newgrounds.com (which was a site i visited very often at the time …. and still do. ) ! So I tried making a complete copy, and even stealing as much code from them as I could … since I couldn’t code myself. The portal didn’t turn out as i planned and wasn’t automatic at all. I went around the web looking for free scripts and replacing their copyrights and script names with my own. After a while I changed my mind about making it into a flash portal, and started making a music portal out of it instead. Uploading illegal music for download and stealing information on artists from other sites. I was changing the layout at least once a week and most of the time starting the whole site all over again when I decided to install a phpBB forum on the site. When I did that everything turned out a lot better, and at about this time I left for summer vacation.

Every summer I go away for 2 months to my nice peaceful summerplace in the north and sleep away the long days. Well, the summer went quickly as usual and when I came back some *^Å*"#¤ had hacked my forums and sent me a dozen emails telling me that he had done so … as if I couldn’t figure that out by myself. Since I hadn’t even thought about backing up the forums I installed them all over again. This time I learned how to mod my forums (I called them BBS, short for Bulletin Board System, since Newgrounds did so too), I installed hundreds of mods, all that I could find. Some of them I didn’t install correctly so they didn’t work, I deleted parts of the code so the forum didn’t screw up or if nothing happened I didn’t bother doing anything at all. So after a while my forums just gave up on me and let out a dreadful sigh as they plunged down onto their deathbed. I promised myself to back up my forums every month after this.

I installed the forums all over again! Now my site layout looked pretty good though, and I had learned the basics of HTML and how to include stuff using PHP, so I had headers and footers and a side menu on my site! Which I was very proud of. I actually started adding some content and modding my forum more carefully and it started turning out really good! I had started watching tons of anime, so the new site was basically all about anime this time. I was even building up a huge anime database with over 1000 anime series (information taken from other sites, of course), when suddenly I did something to the forum database and *kapoof* everything was erased. Well, it didn’t matter that much since I had backed up the database every month, right ??? Now that I mentioned it I realized I hadn’t backed up anything at all!

This put me into a deep depression and I didn’t work on my site that much ... to tell the truth I did start working like a maniac, but then I had too many things to do and I didn’t know where to start so I abandoned the project and sank down in a despairful age of grief. About a year had passed by since the last summer now and I had to leave for summer vacation again so I put up a temporary poem on the site and headed North.

When I came back I learned CSS and PHP and ASP and about SQL and JAVA and PUTCIIT and EVERYTHING you need to know (wonder why I hadn’t done that before... hmmm). I went out on a quest for a good simple CMS system, and after trying about 20 ( I seriously did try that many ), I found WordPress! One of the greatest open-source blogging scrips ever created. So I then added some stuff to the script and I built my own site engine with all the new knowledge I had acquired during these past months. I was back at the beginning again, but this time with a lot of website developing experience and skills. Everything was going great.

The days went. The weeks went. My site loaded slower and slower and I eventually had to wait minutes to get into my control panel. I wasn't getting much help from my web host's support either. It was clear that they were also overselling, and I had a much more expensive plan than I needed, since I needed a mySQL database (which the cheaper plan didn't have). Thus, I decided it was time to swap hosts. After thorough searching I found WHB (read more about them /webmasters.html">here). They had a plan twice as cheap, with all the features I could ever want and a free domain for life. So I signed up with them and, since the old web host wouldn't let me transfer my domain name, I selected cyberdb.org as the site's new one. Moving over the files was a nightmare, as the site has grown pretty big and I only had a 0.5 mbps Internet connection at the time. I managed to move over all the files at last, set up the databases and shut down the old cyberdyze.com. An end, and a new beginning.

Chapter 2 - The Merge

CyberDB.org had a short-lived but pretty awesome run. It all started with WordPress, but for some reason I moved onto the somewhat easier, lighter, with-text-based-storage-instead-of-SQL (which I thought was much better at the time).

Simultaneously with my CyberDB site, I started a new one named CyberD, which I was going to use more as a portfolio for design, and a place to sell my services. Or was it the other way around? CyberDB because my professional portfolio website, with all kinds of personal resources and stuff, and CyberD became my more personal blog. Even after the movie, I used a bunch of engines. I tried a simple blogging script based on PHP/mySQL for the new blog, and I tried some Russian text-based script very similar to CuteNews for the other one. It had a bunch of plugins for additional features like user login, forums, MIDI collection (for a while I had a MIDI collection boasting hundreds of thousands of files - maybe one of the biggest browsable collections on the Internet at the time, collected from various available archives), polls, etcetc.

It was a pretty good script, but there were some security issues, and translation issues, and there must have been some other issues as well, because eventually I abandoned it and moved back to WP then. Simultaneously, I moved away from CuteNews, transferring both all posts and comments manually since there was no automatic export/import feature between these two very different CMS systems. The move took a long time, but once it was over, I settled in with a brand new WP installation and have kept building on from there!

At this time, the WP script had been greatly improved. I don't think it was just my host - it was faster, it wasn't so prone to errors, it was more secure... basically it was better in all ways possible. And this was somewhat before WP conquered the web and became the #1 CMS everyone seems to turn to when they're looking to open a blog. When they got rid of the issue that made creating the same slug for a post and a page crash the blog, things were perfect!

My memories from this time are a bit hazy, but I'm sure there's some official announcement on the merge, that fateful time when I decided to mash both CYberDB and CyberD together and make a consistent product out of it all (I just started writing this part, to be continued)...

The present

Always present, never left behind.
New things are constantly popping up in my mind.
Let us follow this path
Let us see what we find

There is treasure in the ground
... and it shines.

The future

We’re not there yet, lets see what happens!

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