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Site History
This is the tale of the development of the sites that directly lead us to where we are today.
~Phase One~
Traveling back in time... This brings us to sometime around the summer of 2000. The very first glimmer of what will become Ethereal Destination is born. It was a guild on Neopets, entitled Final Fantasy Fans Forever, back before that site became a mess of corporate interests. The second version of the old guild is still online there, actually. It can be found here, for those interested, though it is closed now.
The first version of the guild had been deleted, I don't quite remember why, but the current version was opened in 2002.
~Phase Two~
Eventually, I started outgrowing the Neopets guild and I needed a place to keep gaming information and things. Thus, the original Final Fantasy Fans Forever website was born. It is still here for those interested. It was pretty bad, though towards the end I started figuring out enough html to code a decent-looking layout on my own. (I didn't, there. For the second and final layout I used a free layout from somewhere.) It had some useful information, but mostly the site was a mess of images. The official move from amateur to an attempt at a decent fansite and move into the realm of the larger sites officially began December 15, 2003. Before this date I didn't much keep official dated updates, so the dates are foggy and mostly guesswork.
~Phase Three~
Finally, I had outgrown Geocities hosting and had my heart set on opening my own domain. So, around late December of 2003, I opened fffansforever.com. With this, I finally got Photoshop to help me with graphics and things. I had a massive improvement in layouts very quickly with its help. FFF4e had several stages through its lifespan. Stage one saw mostly redevelopment of old content pages and the growth of my abilities with Photoshop and page coding. Eventually, my pages grew so much that it was a pain to change layouts, so that became few and far-between until Arei helped me learn a neat little PHP technique.
Stage Two: Not long after, I became loaded with college work and did not have much time to devote to layouts, and I wanted to integrate some features that were causing confusion with all the different logins people had to make to access everything. I decided to install a CMS to alleviate many of these problems and to help some of our less coding-oriented staff members make updates without my help. I chose PHP-Nuke for this task, mostly because my host offered an automatic installer for it and it seemed to be the most versatile. I did not last long with Nuke, it became buggy and had too many problems for my liking. FFF4e was in a major slump, hits were dying, the forums slowed nearly to nothing, and my host had been going down for weeks at a time. It was time for a major change.
~Phase Four~
I decided it was time for a new, better domain name. As FFF4e perished, Ethereal Destination was in development. EDG went live at the end of July 2005, and officially opened to the public on August 5, 2005. This era came to an end during December of 2005. I realized that so many other sites have very nearly the same content as I do and I felt that it was useless for me to spend hours writing things that aren't likely to ever be used or even found by other people.
~Phase Five~
Phase Five officially began on January 9th, 2006 with the reopening of the site after a weeks-long downtime. Eventually the Site was split into ED, Mystile Graphics, and Ziedrich Content and Media. This phase ended with a denial of service attack on the etherealdestination.net domain, August of 2006. We were forced to change domain names. This was the era of many failed changes and difficult problems that caused the site to nearly die out again. Thankfully we have several loyal forum members and staff that have stuck through this with us and given me a reason to keep working on the site in a revival attempt.
~Phase Six~
This phase began with the reopening of the site on the Ziedrich.net domain on November 15, 2006. It was decided that the multiple-site network thing wasn't working out, so it was all merged back together. Mystile.net became a joint Topsites listing with two of our partner sites, Endless Vortex and Square Chronicles. Our long-time partner Kurai Shukumei had had crippling downtime most of 2006, so we decided to merge the two sites to create a megasite for anime and gaming.
Past Layouts - Ethereal Destination
Version 1: Symphony of the Night
Version 2: Relinquish Your Pain Unto Me
Version 3: Haze of Truths
Version 4: Mysteries of Time
Version 5: Stricken
Version 6: Resurrection
Version 7: Time Unbound
Past Layouts - Mystile
Version 1: A Dream's Kiss
Past Layouts - Ziedrich
Version 1
Version 2: Wrath
Version 3: Fated to Darkness
Version 4
Version 5
Version 6 - Current
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