Now a Blog

TJ Online is my personal website and my second oldest website after the crabbing guide. I use this site as a place to post my articles, photos, artworks, and other random things. The site started out some time in 2004-2005 although I don’t remember exactly when. Back then I was a real newbie at web technologies and design (I still am far from an expert, but falsely believe that I’m proficient), and the website was built using plain HTML with some tacky looking Flash/JavaScript buttons. I don’t even have the files for my first design anymore, but during most of the html phase my website looked like the picture below.

Old HTML TJ Online, circa 2004-2005

During those archaic days my websites bounced around several different free hosts and eventually they ended up in a free host called dhost.info which offered PHP and MySQL. It is during that time I actually learned about dynamic websites and that there’s many free scripts that one can use to run such a website. TJ Online has grown since its beginnings and it was getting tedious updating all the HTML pages manually, so I remade my website using the CMS Xoops. My Xoops website initially looked the first picture below, but it went through a number of themes.

TJ Online Xoops theme 1, circa 2005

TJ Online Xoops theme 2, circa 2006

TJ Online Xoops theme 3, circa 2006-2008

In the August of 2006, after a major downtime at the free host, I finally decided to pony up the cash and get a paid web host. With that came the tonyjiang.com domain name, and my Xoops website went through one final theme change. Since I forgot to take a screen shot of my Xoops site before deleting it off the server, I can only present a screenshot of my design mock-up.

TJ Online Xoops final theme, circa 2008-2009

The Xoops website lasted for a total of about four years. In December of 2009, I decided to convert my website to the popular blogging platform Wordpress mostly just for the heck of it. This is website that you are looking at right now.