My history on the Internet. I’m sure I missed a lot of things, but my memory isn’t always the best.

Enjoy my story.

I don’t remember all that much about the early years of my Internet journey, because it’s been so long ago. I remember asking my mom if I could make an email address, because I thought that it was so cool to have once, since all the adults had one. Eventually my mom let me make one, and I made it with Hotmail. I emailed mostly just my grandma and mom funny pictures I found on the Internet all day. After a year or two, I get tired of Hotmail and ditched it for a Yahoo mail account, but the first yahoo address got flooded with spam so I made another one. After that I was a lot more careful about giving out my email. Emailing was lots of fun, even though I didn’t have many people to actually email…

Not long after I discovered MySpace, but his was when it was still actually popular. I knew that my mom used it sometimes and I figured that I should make an account too. I did so without telling anyone and started adding lots of my friends and eventually added my mom. Adding my mom as a friend almost got me in trouble, because I wasn’t supposed to have a MySpace. I stayed on MySpace for a long time, until I finally got bored of it, since everyone else left. At that point I still didn’t know about Facebook.

About the time I started getting bored of MySpace, I found my very first forum. It was the forum for the game FreeRider 2, where people could post their own custom tracks and talk about the game. I became well known throughout the community; eventually becoming the 3rd highest ranked member with over 500 posts. The other two were Shinny77 and peanutbutta. They became my friends after a while, since we all shared fame on the board. I actually help out peanutbutta from a guy flaming him by finding the flamer’s password – which he had posted a long time ago, thinking that no one would believe him—, logging into his account and changing his password, so he could no longer log in. I felt pretty good about that.

One day the board was shut down (I never knew why), and was replaced with a God awful new “anonymous” track posting system; it was horrid. This is where I got interested into making my own websites. I decided to try and revive the old community as much as I could by making a FreeRider Fan website, complete with the game and forum. The community thrived pretty well for quite a while, even though it was mostly just Shinny77, peanutbutta, a few other guys and me posting. At the time I was using web.com and their forum system, which sucked. So I decided to go poking around for different forum software that I could just easily embed into my web.com site. I eventually stumbled upon Forummotion, and embedded it on the site. Shinny77 was not very happy about the change, since it had deleted all the posts and users and everything. Despite being mad about it, he let it slide that time and continued posting. Then, I made a huge mistake… I got bored of Forummotion and decided to switch to FreeFrum, which used PHPBB. I had already lost almost half my users with the first change, but with the second change almost all of the users had gotten mad and left, including Shinny77. Only peanutbutta and a few others remained posting, but eventually the site just died down and become dead.

Even after all that I was still very interested in making my own websites, but I still didn’t know anything about coding in HTML or CSS. So I just kept using webs.com and other free “web site making websites”. My second website that was actually popular was one I made in 8th grade. It was a flash gaming website that I had made using Ucoz.com so the kids at my school could play games in tech class, since all the other game sites were blocked. That website had a really great run, until the I.T. guys at my school finally caught it and blocked it. I had pretty much everyone in my entire grade playing games on it, and some in the high school too. It was awesome, because I was almost famous among my school for doing that. Sadly after it was blocked, no one used it anymore and died off.

I’m not 100% sure when I did this(so I just put it here), but at one time I wanted to make a simple social network to have all my friends and family on without all the annoying people on it. I found a software called wall.fm, it was called something else when I used, but I can’t remember what it was. I did make a social network and I called it “Tutter”. After a while of using the default URL I asked my grandma to buy me a real one. Eventually I got her to say yes, and I got the URL www.tutter.us from Godaddy. Several years of having this service, Tutter grew to be over 15,000 members, but most of them were just random people from India who only came once. It was still pretty cool to know that my site reached over 15,000 members… Eventually I got bored of it, since no one really used it, just randomly signed up; I abandoned it and moved on, although I did check up on it every now and again.

By this time, I was mostly just wasting my time away on Facebook, Youtube, and other flash game sites. I was in 9th grade, and I had wanted to try and make another flash game site for the kids at my school for play on. At this time, I knew about HTML, but I didn’t know how to use it or anything, so I thought this new website would be good practice as I learn how to code. To learn how to code, I just did a quick Google search on it; ended up at w3schools.com, which taught me the majority of what I know about HTML and CSS. After I had the basic concepts of coding a website, I did a little search for a free hosting service and found a service called Cwahi.net. It gave me free, unlimited storage and bandwidth, which I thought was awesome. I needed a name for this site, so I looked at my keyboard and pushed random characters until I got a name; pi0x. Pi0x.cwahi.net wasn’t very popular as a game site with my friends at school, so I figured I might want to find somewhere to advertise a little. This is how I got to Vizzed; I didn’t go there just to spam my website or anything. I originally found it by searching for a new game site to play on. I soon realized that Vizzed had a big community that might want to visit my website, so I signed up under the username pi0x. I realized that my gaming site wasn’t going to be popular, so I turned it into a blog type thing. I wanted to give it that blog style that the personal blogs at SydLexia had, so I left it almost barebones for the longest time.

Since it is an Acmlmboard, Vizzed allows users to have custom post layouts. I thought this was very neat, and I started to learn more about CSS so I too could have a really cool post layout. Although my first few layouts were indeed terrible, I was learning a lot. Once I figured out how to do the “View Source” thing on Chrome, I took the code from one of the premade layouts and studied it and used it to practice; tweaking and playing with the code. I eventually started to feel more comfortable with coding all together.

My knowledge of HTML and CSS wasn’t the only things that were growing at Vizzed. My number of friendships was too. I was constantly posting on the forums and chatting in the chat rooms with some genuinely nice people. Since I wasn’t a total newbie or troll, people actually liked me and gave me what is called Trust Points. I easily became a trusted member and pretty well known on the board. I met one special person in particular, her username is crazycatpup, but her real name is Kelly.

Since I knew a lot more about CSS, I pimped out my blog site a little, but Cwahi’s servers crashed and I couldn’t get on to do anything for a long, long time. Eventually I just gave up on Cwahi and found a new free hosting service, the one I found wasn’t unlimited, but it would suffice. It was called 000webhost.com.

Around this time at Vizzed, I had applied for a Local Moderator job, which I originally didn’t get, but later the owner of the site added few new sections to the forums and I was made a mod, for they needed an extra person. Sadly being a mod didn’t last very long for me; 3 months. Every month I barely scraped up enough staff points to make quota, and eventually I got a little scolding from the Local Mod Manager and was demoted at the end of that month. Since I didn’t do anything to actually cause a lot of trouble, they gave me the standard Vizzed Elite position which is given to anyone who held a staff position, was demoted and didn’t cause any trouble. I didn’t cry too much over getting demoted, since I knew exactly why I was demoted, and I’m fairly mature with those sorts of things.

Anyways…

I managed to get by with it and my barebones blog for quite a while, I even had a few readers, but I soon got tired of having to code each individual page by hand and re-upload them every time I posted a new post. So I did a little research on blog software and came upon Wordpress. I downloaded it and tried to configure it for a long time, after consulting the 5 minute install guide, I finally figured it out. Once I got my Wordpress blog all set up, I got a lot more readers and more posts in. I posted a lot of my art and music and stuff as well as some of my thoughts and stories. I surprisingly got a lot of people reading.
All was good on the internet at this point, I was just having fun on posting and chatting with people, and I had gotten an awesome girlfriend; Kelly, the one I had met almost a year before. I was also getting into a new site called Google+, which is basically Google’s own social network. I was actually able to get one before it was officially released, I got an invite from a friend. Not much later a new person a Vizzed arrived, who was called Lazlo Falconi. This was during the Tour de Vizzed, and he pretty much swept everyone by surprise, he posted like crazy and held the White banner for most of the competition. Lazlo and I quickly became friends, since we both shared interests in things like coding websites, Linux, and just computers in general. After a while we added each other on Google+ and talk a bit. He one day decided to make his own website and forum, and asked me to join, of course I gladly accepted his invitation and joined his new forum. There I met some pretty cool dudes. After a while of using a phpBB board, Lazlo switched to Acmlmboard, which I thought was awesome, since I could make and show off my lovely layouts.

One day I was on Vizzed when Lazlo contacted me and we chatted for a bit, he then asked me if I wanted a spot on his server. He said I could do whatever I wanted with it. Once again I gladly accepted, and quickly moved all my blog stuff over to his server. I was still using Wordpress, but I needed a good theme, and all of the pre-made ones just didn’t do it for me. I wanted to find out how to make my own. I did countless Google searches on how to do it, but it all seemed very complex and I didn’t really want to mess with all that confusion. Instead, I found the simplest pre-made Wordpress theme I could find, and taught myself how to tweak it to my liking. I got it to where it looked nothing like the original base I started with, with the help of Lazlo giving me pointers as made it. He seemed quite impressed with what I came out with and I was really impressed at myself for figuring it all out.

Of course this blog wasn’t half as popular as my last one, but I did take a lot more pride in it, since it was the first one I had ever actually made my “own” layout for. I posted lots of different things on it and got a few more readers every now and again, but still not a whole lot. Everything just carried on like normal from here.

Until Davideo7 posted a sign up thread for VGR and RGR staff on Vizzed. I thought that I should do more things to help Vizzed, since it has been pretty good to me. I signed up for Screenshot adder, which I figured would be very simple, and it is. Not more than a few days later I was hired as screenshot adder and I chose to do all the PS3 games, which was 80 full pages of games. I figured that would keep me busy for a while. I obviously do a better job as a screenshot adder than when I was a mod…

That’s basically all I have up to this point… although I probably missed a lot of stuff.