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A History Of The Anime Ratings Guide...

I was poking around the net and came across a site that had a nice timeline of web page screen shots showing the evolution of their web site over the past decade. I've spent the last few hours researching the history of AARG (the Anime Ratings site) to create something similar here. It's not much to look at, but, it's very interesting (at least for me) to see how far my web design skills have come.
Browse through billions of web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is a service that allows people to visit archived versions of Web sites. Visitors to the Wayback Machine can type in a URL, select a date range, and then begin surfing on an archived version of the Web. Imagine surfing circa 1999 and looking at all the Y2K hype, or revisiting an older version of your favorite Web site. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine can make all of this possible.

The archives of my web-site on the Wayback Machine are not necessarily complete. There will be missing images and broken links, etc... But, you should get a fairly good idea of how the anime ratings site has evolved over time. For those of you who are not familiar with the "Wayback Machine"...

Oct 1998 to May 2003: I signed up with GeoCities on October 15, 1998. At the time, GeoCities had a concept known as "neighborhoods". You would pick a community of like-minded cyber-residents to move in with and GeoCities would assign you to a neighborhood within that community. As it happens, I wound up in Area 51.

My initial foray into web design featured various stone-textured backgrounds. This design was not particularly easy on the eyes, or, for that matter, easy to read. This design lingered for a few months and was eventually replaced with a black background with blue accents. The new layout made use of tables and was, in general, much easier to read than the previous layout. In March 1999, Yahoo purchased GeoCities...
The companies' shares rose Thursday on news of the popular Web portal site's plan to buy GeoCities in a stock swap worth $4.6 billion. GeoCities, which offers free space for noncommercial websites, boasts of more than 3.5 million members, making it the single largest online community site on the Web.
There were a lot of complaints regarding the merger of Yahoo and GeoCities. Among the complaints, it was noted that GeoCities was becoming more "corporate". Despite, the reported problems associated with the merger with Yahoo, GeoCities was a good home. But, late in 2001, the neighborhood showed signs of change. I got the following message from GeoCities...
Congratulations, [your site] seems to be very popular and has been receiving a large amount of traffic. Our records indicate that you're using more than the allotted amount of data transfer we provide for a free web site, which is 3 gigabytes per month (measured on an hourly basis). That means that during the past few days we had to temporarily turn your site off to keep the bandwidth within this limit.
I spent a lot of time reducing the size of each web-page and optimizing every image for size. I hadn't seen any additional "love notes" from GeoCities for almost a year.

Music (May 2001 to Feb 2003): For a few years, I maintained a music download page. Initially, I hosted the music files on the GeoCities site. But after I began receiving warnings about my bandwidth usage, I transferred the music site to a server on V3 Space. At the height of the music download site's popularity, I had roughly 70 tracks from various anime CD soundtracks.

However, the after the music industry began tightening their grip on domestic music distribution, V3 Space took that as their cue to clean house and pulled the plug on my music download site. Since its demise, I have not bothered to restore the music download site.

The archives of my web-site are not necessarily complete. There will be missing images and broken links, etc...

Note: I'm fairly certain that the music files were not preserved on the Wayback Machine.

Oct 2002 to Jan 2004: Then in 2002, GeoCities sent the following note...
Beginning April 2, 2002, we will no longer provide FTP access as part of our free home page service. Free members interested in continuing their FTP service are encouraged to consider our premium packages. All packages include FTP access, remote loading of images, ad-free pages, and much more...
The black background with blue accents, which had been in use since 1999, would remain the dominant design until the demise of the GeoCities site.

Early in 2003, I've decided to move my site from GeoCites to Verizon. GeoCities was a good home, but, they've always had problems with their adware. The adware problems would often cause JavaScript on my pages to fail. This required some extreme measures on my part to keep the site working properly (like having three navigation menus on every page) and made it very difficult to add additional functionality to the site. That, combined with the lack of FTP access and bandwidth restrictions made the decision to move easier.

Jan 2004 to Mar 2005: In 2004, I had moved away from an image-based to a text-based navigation system. I was also using far more CSS and JavaScript than in earlier versions of the anime ratings site. In addition, the anime ratings site had evolved from a simple list of titles and ratings and now included a comprehensive database of plot summaries. The black background in previous incarnations of the Anime Ratings site, was now replaced by a nice bright gradient and the overall design was greatly simplified.

Shortly after making the transition from Yahoo to Verizon, Verizon was hit by a rash of security issues. They responded by locking down various services and increasing security throughout their network. The resulting security changes caused a ripple effect in the user web spaces, commonly resulting in a "423 Error: Resource Locked"...
Customers may experience a "locked web space" error message when attempting to access their site. Engineers are researching the issue. There is no ETR.
The issue was eventually resolved in the latter part of 2004.

In 2005, I continued to push the design of the site in new directions. I employed multiple layers of graphics and a variety of CSS techniques to give the site a completely different look and feel.

As the transition phase, from Yahoo to Verizon, was winding down and search engines, such as Yahoo and Google, began to index the pages on the new server, I began to notice additional aliases floating around. The web space documentation notes that most web spaces have been migrated from the GTE domain, but, that legacy references to the GTE domain will still function. The GTE domain is probably a hold over from the pre-Verizon (Bell Atlantic/GTE) era web space service.
In 2006, I changed the layout of the site from a bright blue background, featuring various visual effects from scrolling content windows to mouseover ripple effects, to a much darker background. The front page featured a semi-transparent picture of Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop. The interior pages featured various ray-traced images as backgrounds. Later, after a critique by Anime Cosmo, I changed the site to a shades of gray and blue and worked to keeping a consistent look and feel throughout the site. Eventually, by the end of 2007, I would consolidate or eliminate some of the core pages including the image gallery, the about page, guest book and, awards page.

In 2010, after upgrading to Windows 7, I found, much to my dismay, that I had to get a new ISP and as a consequence, the Anime Rating Guide was migrated to its current home on the Anime Ratings Blog (blog@AARG).

Later, I would add my own hand-crafted Related Post widget to all of the pages on the site. Existing related post widgets found out in the wild were not really ideal for my specific needs, so, I resurrected the linking mechanism from my legacy site to show the previous and next links in an alphabetical hierarchy of pages. Keeping the linking mechanism up to date is a manual process, but, it's not too difficult.
Since Moving the Anime Ratings Guide to Blogger in 2010, large portions of the legacy content (several hundred pages in total) had to be migrated to Blogger one page at a time. By 2017, I had finally completed the migration of all of the legacy content to Blogger and I had taken advantage of New Blogger Templates to revamp the site. I also took the opportunity to Move The Wallpapers to a dedicated page rather than a post. The following year, I wrote an article summarizing my experiences with the new template in A Year With The Contempo Template.

Late in 2018, thanks in part to the tragic loss of my primary backup hard-drive, I decided to document my Adventures In Microsoft Access as I worked to recover the critical data I used to inventory the 4000+ movies in my personal collection and the queries I rely on to build portions of the Anime Ratings Guide. Although much of the database had been reconstructed successfully within a week, some critical meta data was lost and it actually took several months to rebuild this data, before I could post new entries to the site and have all of the underlying web rings and related post links line up correctly.

In the aftermath of the data reconstruction, I decided to revisit the existing navigation scheme and the Related Post gadget in particular to come up with a process that was a bit less tedious to maintain. Since I already captured data from the site in a database, I thought it might be possible to build a rudimentary mechanism to automatically generate the web ring links, the related post links and the rating overlays in real-time rather than hard-coding them on each page. As it happened, the change worked reasonably well and allowed for the reduction of the overall footprint of  site with the elimination of some gadgets and some JSON requests. In addition, I was able to increase the number of web rings from two to three -- Anime, Mainstream and Other.

In 2019, I made an additional refinement to the design of the site to allow long blocks of text to be collapsed, thus reducing the footprint of really long pages. In addition, the Anime List was completely revamped. Formerly, there were two hard-coded lists on two pages, but, the new list can now be dynamically sorted and filtered on one page instead of two and even includes a pie chart. Later in 2019, I felt the need to manually update the archive of my site on the Wayback Machine. The last large-scale image of my site was from 2012, so, it was well overdue for a refresh.