My first website is dedicated to the Ultima series, a series of RPGs spanning over 20 years. Dino's Ultima Page began humbly as a host for the once-lost "The Lost Vale" fanfiction. The site eventually grew into one of the leading Ultima news and information sites.
Dino's Ultima Page has remained active over the years, even though the addition of information has somewhat slowed down. I have frequently used it as a testing ground for new web technologies, and most of what I learned in the early years of my internet presence came from experimenting and trying to add new things to Dino's Ultima Page.
Gigi's Computer Corner is
the latest attempt at a computer-related website,
after the failures with D-Scripts and Code-X (not to mention Edunity). For
a whole year it has had a simple layout of a single page to avoid growing
more than it needs to, and to avoid repeating past mistakes with old websites.
The name of the site shares the same initials as the GNU Compiler Collection, and was the first time I used my University nickname for a website.
Gigi's Gym is a ground-up rewrite of my main site,
Daniel D'Agostino on the web. It is a complete overhaul of both design
and content, and was created in the event of the new nullneuron.net domain.
My first blog, Gigi on IT, was
started on 21st December 2008 as a small place complementary to
Gigi's Computer Corner, where I could upload random
information about Information Technology quickly and easily, without having
to waste time coding entire webpages to upload simple information.
Gigi on Games, my other blog, is
where I post random information about games. I have wanted to create a
generic games site (other than Ultima, for which I already have a large
website) for a long time. Since I also have been wanting to try out WordPress,
I took the opportunity to create a WordPress blog about games, and on
24th September 2009, Gigi on Games appeared on the web. The blog is expected
to contain random information about games, focusing mainly (but not exclusively)
on older games for which there is little information on the internet, and with
a tendency to use a lot of screenshots to enhance the reading experience.
In March 2003, school was nearly over. In a few days, the friends with whom
I had spent so much time at school would each go their separate ways. Realising
this, I created a website
through which we could keep in touch. The Olde
Edwardian contains some memories of those last few days of school, and also
had some interactive scripts such as a forum, a guestbook and a chatterbox
through which we could communicate online.
It was a clear fact that the site would eventually cease to be updated since we had finished school, but my hopes were that the forum would continue to thrive. Unfortunately, this was not to be, because only a handful of friends actually bothered to use the forum, and eventually they too lost interest. Years later, I disabled the scripts altogether because of spam attacks.
In June 2005, a group of old school friends got together and made an
action/comedy film called "The Maltese Job". In September 2005 they offered me
a part in their next film, which is now called "Blood Money". Apart from acting
in this film, I also helped out by creating a website for the group and taking
behind-the-scene photos. The filming website was launched
on the 27th, and has information about the films and the people involved.
Short for "Educational Community", Edunity came shortly after Dino's Ultima
Page. It was my first attempt at a technical information site, and was supposed
to provide information about both coding and school subjects. This site had
a very short life, as I had clearly underestimated the amount of work required
to populate the website.
The time employed to design the website, however, was not wasted. The design kept being tweaked from time to time, and is the ancestor of the design used by Dino's Ultima Page today, and the rest of my websites.
About the time I scrapped Edunity, I had discovered PHP, which simplified
updating website navigation and also allowed me to write complex scripts,
making my websites more interactive. One of my first scripts, and my biggest
to date, was a forum script called D-iscussion Board. I started a new
site called D-Scripts to host D-iscussion Board, and in time added tutorials
and other scripts. I eventually gave up on D-Scripts because it was too
troublesome to update.
Code-X was the immediate successor of D-Scripts, whose purpose was to break
away from the uniform design used by my three sites at the time, and also
to solve the problem D-Scripts had with being too complex to update. This site
experimented with things like default fonts and horizontal navigation that I
had not dared to try before. The design, at least in my opinion, looked much
nicer than that of any site I had made before. However, I made it so detailed
and so complicated that in the end it became even more exasperating than
D-Scripts to keep up to date. It had defeated its own purpose, and I gave up on
it as well.
I don't really remember what made me create my personal website,
Daniel D'Agostino on the web.
Perhaps it was the fact that I had, at one point, three websites each with the
same information about me, so it would have been better to centralise the
information in its own website. Whatever the case, this became a fourth site on
my network, but eventually it grew and became the main network site.
Eventually, both the information in the site and the visual layout became old. I decided to rewrite the site completely from scratch in summer 2007, so this site is now superceded by Gigi's Gym.