Nivan.net's History

The site that was to eventually become Nivan.net was spawned in 1999 when myself and a friend of mine decided to clone a website that we had printed out. I found a very old backup recently that tells me the original document was saved on 6th October 1999. Using the AWESOME POWER of Microsoft Word, a disaster was created. I switched to FrontPage shortly after, and created MORE disasters. Don't let me catch any of you guys using that for making websites. (Although I'm told it's less evil now.)

Shortly afterwards, in 2000, I learnt HTML, and I've written all my webpages "by hand" since. A vaguely complex website called NicksSite (Later NicksSite Online) evolved, first online 27/07/00, incorporating the "How to be annoying" section from the original, plus a section for the computer game Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun, a freeware listing page, and, later, a Star Wars section, with subsections!

Roughly a year later, on 26/06/01, I brought out the next version of the site, NSO, which had a much cleaner layout, and was much more organised. At this point, the How To Be Annoying section - the page that started it all - got left to the ages.

The next iteration of that design, and the one that saw my Star Wars site to its grave, was designed especially for the grand opening of Nivan.net on 04/08/02. At this point, the Star Wars section became the main site, and the other sections were retired.

Around January 2003, a subdirectory was created in secret: Nivan.net/cartoon was born. Hosting the very early episodes of Costanza Falcon, and sporting a very basic layout, the subsection slowly expanded (including an awful and thankfully short-lived Flash-only layout, at one point), and eventually caused Nivan.net to split into two! At some point in early April 2003, the Nivan.net intro page introduced a link to Nivan.net/cartoon next to the link into the main Star Wars site.

Later that year, on the 12th September, the Nivan.net Praxeum, as the Star Wars section was called, was put on hiatus as I headed off to Uni, where I was unsure of what capabilities I had to update the site. The Nivan.net/cartoon site (by now called Nivan Animation Studios) got a similar annoucement. Nivan.net Praxeum never recovered from that hiatus, as I found I didn't have the time to update the site, despite having the capabilities of doing so after all. I did, however, find time to develop the Nivan Animation Studios site (while producing more cartoons for it), and gave it a decent layout based on one I designed for a Futurama Fan site, The Leela Zone.

Nivan Animation Studios finally took over the entire of Nivan.net on 2nd January 2005, and got a special new layout of its own, characterised by an orange-gradient border around the entire page. A later iteration moved the orage gradient just around the page's contents, and bolted the page header and footer to the edge of the window.

Mutantboy.com was purchased on 24/11/05, and went live on 11/12/05. It was purchased with the intention of being an easier-to-remember alias for nivan.net, just as (for instance) dinosaurcomics.com is to qwantz.com, of which I own neither. At this point, another redesign was necessary to incorporate the mutantboy.com domain. A simpler layout with a purple header is the result.

The webspace is currently provided by Supanames on one of their no-frills Linux servers, and controlled by a mix of PHP and SXHTML (XSHTML?). In the future I hope to have my own dedicated webserver, and run the site as a Turbogears project.

About the webmaster

Nick Murdoch here! I'm 22 as of December 2006 and was born, raised, and now live in the United Kingdom, near London. I graduated from the University of Kent in 2005 and am currently working for a web technologies company called Locayta, which is based in London.

You can e-mail me at [myfirstname][at]nivan.net, or to find out more about me (hi, stalkers), visit my homepage at Nevira.net.