Before the site

I was still in elementary school when my family got a computer. Before that we had pure game machines and such though. And first it was only a source for games and having fun. I wasn't even allowed to be on the darn thing without a shaperone sitting right next to me. Then the rule was I had to have a shaperone in the room, then the rule was I couldn't be home alone and then they loosened up and let me play free.

I learned my way around the computer, and I started surfing the net just a bit. It was through Buffy I really got into the net and I started writing fanfics, which I submitted to archives. I never thought about getting my own site because I always thought it was expencive and difficult.

In the beginning: The Homestead site

Early in 2001, my first year of high school a classmate told me she had started her own website and that it was both free and easy. Curious I asked her how she did it and she explained it to me. So the very next day I went to Homestead and got myself a free account and made a simple pagebuilder site called "Buffy & Angel 4-ever". I don't have a screencap of how the site looked like back then, because frankly I didn't know how to do them.

At first it was all good for me, I had fun doing drag'n drop and I tested out what homestead had to offer me. Of course, it was a newbie site and it sucked, but what starting out site doesn't? But then homestead announced that they were going to charge money for the same offer they had for free for years before. I was panicking, because I couldn't afford paying for hosting, I had to find an other free alternative. I got a geocities account, but I found the drag'n drop program more difficult to handle and I didn't have a clue about html. So I wrote a plea on my homestead site to people to help me or to at least save my fanfics. And rescue came to me in form of a sweedish girl who had been a regular visitor of mine. She took aside time to write me a basic html tutorial, everything that I would be needing starting out.

Starting from almost scratch: The Geocities site

I saved the fanfics and some of the wallpapers and such and used those as a content basis. In July 2001 I opened a new site with the same name, this time all coded with html. That too was pretty sucky, it had no real layout in the beginning, only colors, but as I learned more and more tags from surfing around other sites and such I slowly understood the idea and concept of graphics and layouts.

I was almost daily updating the site, so it progressed pretty quickly. In 2002 I slowly started to diddle with javascripts, not really having a clue on how they worked I just changed some bits and tested them out. Around the same time I also started to make my layouts into themes and not just one background here, one background there.

2. August 2002 I decided to do something with the lame site name so I started going through options as well as trying to make a new layout, what eventually ended up suiting the layout best, ended up becoming the site's new name, Dream Universe.

Then when December was due I had an idea that ended up becoming a site tradition. I made the very first edition of the christmas calendar, packed with one new treat every day. As I had felt it being pretty successfull I promised that I would continue with it.

Getting hosted

I had started getting some troubles with geocities, like pages going missing and other things simply going wrong, another webmaster at a B/A site had also felt these problems and offered to host me when she got her own domain, so the entire site was slowly moved to my new host. I had an ad-free place to stay and I couldn't be happier.

In October 2003 I started making fanvideos and as I didn't want to burden my host with the bandwidth it would take them to stay up I first got a free account at angelfire to have them up, but the videos got deleted, and slightly desperate I started searching for other options to have my videos up.

Purchasing my own domain

My solution became apparent for me. I had to get myself my own domain, one without restrictions on file sizes and that wouldn't cost too much. And when I finally settled for a host I had to find out a domain name. As I had several sites I didn't want to use either of the sites names for the domain one, as I'd rather have the domain itself to be a collective, so in the end my love for magics, mystics and fantasy landed on the domain name: Shades of Moonlight (If you're frowning on the domain name not making sense, think silhuettes on the moon in the sky).

I sat a record in moving a 100 Mb site in only one week. And I was happy to now be able to offer my fanvideos to download. In December I kept my promise and made the second edition of the calendar, which was also a success.

In April and May 2004 I got to meet several of the cast members of Buffy on my trip to the uk. Not only was this a major experience for me, but when I got home I had a lot of self-taken photos of the people, which I think brought a lot more to the site.

In February 2005 I expanded the site to not only be about Buffy/Angel, but also to include my other relationship obsessions.

Converting to php

As I felt the site really needed tidying up and I wanted every page to be accessable for a search engine I decided to give php a try. A friend of mine offered to teach me the basics and once I got the hang of it, I slowly started to convert the site into php. This also allowed me to really go thoroughly through my content and cut away the dead weight.

I then purchased a better hosting deal that did cause a few days downtime as I moved the site, but as I had allready finished the php-convertion and all I really needed was to upload the site through FTP, it didn't take long to move the site.

Now: What the site has lead to

Thanks to the immense joy I had working with the site, I've started studying IT and am on my first year of a three year bachelor degree. I've especially found love for programming, which I not knowing it had been very well prepared for thanks to my love for studying and altering javascripts. I hope to in the future either work with websites or programming, preferably both. I still love working with the site, I prefere to update several times a week, just like I loved to do when I first started it all.