History of TAOW
Kind of hard to
believe this site has been around so long.
Time really flies,
doesn't it?
And as of the time
of making this page, we're still only on the third game.
Bit by bit, the
fandom's been crumbling away. Sites disappearing and forums going down...
And among all the
destruction, The Adepts of Weyard remains.
If you wish to know
about this site's history, then this is the place.
As well as finding
out how she became a fan, because you totally wanted to know that, right?
It was 2002 A.D. and war was beginning- no, hold on. That's not right.
Ahem. I found out about Golden Sun by hearing about it on a Livejournal friend's blog. I ended up buying it and liked it. By the end of 2002, I was already writing fanfiction and the Golden Sun fandom was doomed. The fanfic section was never really the same again... j/k. I don't know what exactly my first fanfic was. Some of my early fanfiction included a high school AU, a diary fic and a Lord of the Rings parody where Legolas was played by Donpa. Sadly, I am not joking.
It was inevitable I would make a website, really. It started off with the "Test Page" in Saturos's Stupid Stuff, and went from there. Ever wondered why my images are in a folder called testpage? Yeah, uh, that's why. It really would be too much hassle to rename the folder, you know, and who cares anyway. So! I ended up making an actual site and lo and behold, the Garet's Kitchen ripoff was born! (I'm pretty sure I took the idea of naming sections after Adepts from there, haha. Man, Garet's Kitchen was awesome. Thank goodness for Geocities archives.)
The Adepts of Weyard was first put up on Tripod. Back then, we used crappy free webhosts with like 5 MB of free space and ads everywhere. Especially for small hobby sites. It was uploaded around May of 2003.
(BTW, just click on the thumbnails to view larger versions of the images)
I apologize for any blindness or damage to eyes caused by the infernal yellow background. The entire website was like that, sadly. Every page sported a different combination of background and font colour, many of which probably caused eye bleeding in my unfortunate visitors. Apparently, I was immune to bad design choices back then... then again, a lot of people were. We're talking the past, when Geocities was still around after all. The broken images are because it's from the Wayback Machine. It didn't get much of the Tripod version...
The site spent a good while on Tripod, but Tripod had one drawback - forced frames on its members' websites. Ugh. Eventually, I had just had enough of crappy Tripod and wanted to find a new host. Laronmi, a fellow member of the Golden Sun fandom, had just set up a website with hosting available and set me up with some webspace, and so TAOW has been on her server ever since.
At some point, I had a nice table on the front page along with a brand new blurb. Though I ended up doing away with that when someone pointed out that the named sections were pretty confusing, and went with a front page redesign.
The diabolical yellow background was finally done away with. Hallelujah~
I continued to update the site on a regular basis, adding more content and writing fanfiction. I was very prolific with fanfiction indeed. I was an active participant in fandom back in the day for sure. Though I ended up taking a break from the fandom eventually and updated the site less. Golden Sun 3 was taking a very long time to come out and there wasn't really anything new to keep me going. So I went and did other things.
And then, in 2009, Golden Sun 3 was finally announced. I rushed to update the site with news. Actually, I jumped out of my chair and danced a bit at the news, I was so happy. I was so excited that night, I couldn't even sleep. And then we ended up not getting any more news for a whole year. Boy, was that an excruciating 12 months... and I lost sleep again the night of the following E3.
Eventually, Dark Dawn came out and I started adding new content. At the same time, I gave the site a massive overhaul. No more awful page colour combinations, yay!
Dark Dawn stuff was still very much a work in progress. Actually, it still is, whoops. Dark Dawn did very little to rejuvenate my interest though I was still at least uploading some content... now and then. Occasionally. I actually do like Dark Dawn somewhat, despite the fandom's hatred of it, and don't despise it the way so many people do. I like the Dark Dawn characters. Most of them anyway.
Then, in 2014, the apocalypse happened. I just found myself losing interest and was so embarrassed by my humour I threw it all out and hacked the site to bits.
And that's how The Adepts of Weyard ended up being transformed into a soulless husk. Gone was the random humour, insanity and silliness. Now it was totally a serious business website with only informational stuff. Boring, right? And so I tried to leave it all behind me and move on.
Except then I had regrets. Whoops. Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine. I was able to restore most of the removed content, and changed the layout again at the same time. As nice a layout as it was, light text on dark backgrounds just doesn't work for everybody. Even I found it hard on the eyes at times, so it had to change.
And so, in late 2015, TAOW returned to being a site full of random fun and nonsense. Yay~!
And now, we wait and see what the future will bring while I continue to add more random stuff to the site...