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Home Page > Sitely : Site History - The Red Blimp

Site History

I had been making 'sites' before this one. In 2002, I used a blog (in some strange way) to have a primitive site. It was mostly storage for my Pokemon fanfiction - Search for Pokeos (don't comment on that fanfiction or the name, please). There was some Digimon stuff that was rarely updated. The only thing on there was my more or less private (since few people visited and I didn't advertise) posts of my fanfiction which got to 30 chapters before being discontinued out of lack of interest. I don't know if any remnants of it remain. In some point I changed to a dasblog.

I don't remember much of this site's beginnings, except that the *very* earliest form of Critter Cryptics used a blue premade layout from Microsoft Frontpage 2002. It had vertical navigation and didn't last very long - it was never on the internet, though. It didn't have the name yet.

It might have been in 2003 that I made a version I stuck with for a while longer: one with a green palette swap of Butterfree's free layouts and featured the introduction of the site mascot - Aireey the fox (no I don't know what's the deal with the name). Aireey was in the banner. That's all I know. This is a remake of it from what I could dig up on my freewebs account. There was lots of focus on games. Some of them were just messing around with Javascript to see if I could, without changing any code, put the same Javascript to a different use (use the random image generator for something not boring). There was a game that involved clicking on a button which led to another page with a button and it ended with the sun exploding. Very weird. I had a problem with keeping the menu updated on every page - it was a pain to add links to the menu because I had to change the code in every page. This version died while tinkering around with a Javascript tree menu. I think I lost interest. This also never made it to the public.

One that you may have known was the DotNetNuke version of Critter Cryptics. From what I can tell, I started it in 2005. It solved my menu problems and allowed me to make pages without worrying about that. I had 80 links on the menu at one point. A problem of DNN was that I couldn't edit the head or HTML of the document, so I couldn't have Javascript. I solved this with an old freewebs account I never got around to using: the page would be a link to the actual game on Freewebs. It seemed like a great solution. However, I couldn't add a styleswitcher, which bothered me. I also couldn't change the style beyond what DNN allowed me to.

The site had a lot of content, much of it varied. I eventually added a Paper Mario section which was occasionally updated. I had more mascots added here - Tigris the Tiger and Watery (can't remember the spelling) the Crocodile. I had backstories for them but they were lost with the great crash of 2008.

The great crash of 2007 was what took Critter Cryptics off the internet. Every single file was gone. Nothing remained. It was incredibly discouraging and though through Archive.org I salvaged as much as I could, I had given up on making a site.

It was in the spring of '08 that I decided to bring this site back, with a new layout I had been messing around with on 1asphost. It is an edit of Butterfree's free layout, and Paper Mario-themed. I messed with it on 1asphost and decided to edit an old test style named 'Duplighost' and use it in conjunction with the styleswitcher I had been trying out. I added an EarthBound section because there are very few good EarthBound sites on the internet. Early versions of Shadow Style can be seen here and here. One of the final versions of this short lived ASP site can be seen here. A styleswitching test page can be seen here. Note the defunct Duplighost style and the test-only scroll style.

After asking my dad, he allowed The Red Blimp to be hosted as a free site on GoDaddy along with an existing site. It has an ad because it's free, but what can you do? I started using FTP for the first time here, and proceeded to remake my site and it's content.

Now it's the present day. Yay. Hope you've enjoyed your stay!