I should have posted this yesterday, but I was too busy trying to rush out the THAT Animeblog theme that I ended up not doing this, but one day late is better than not at all. First of all, I'd like to thank you. YES YOU for coming to read my blog. Also, some of you would realize that my theme has been changed. Exactly 2 years ago, this was the theme I used for my site when I posted my very first post on this blog. I'm gonna leave this theme up like this for about a week to commemorate 2 years of blogging filled with indecision, frustration, hard work, passion, and fanboying, and most importantly, I would never have continued blogging if not for all my readers continuing to sustain me with comments and encouragement, that gave a hikki like me hope that there actually was someone out there reading this. This post is a brief personal account of when I started my blog until the present day.

Let's go back in time. In 2007 I was a big fan of then big anime bloggers DarkMirage and TJHan. I thought that since I really liked anime and wanted to share the awesomeness of anime with everyone and have a place online for me to fanboy over <insert moe character here> from <insert awesome anime series here>, and having unsuccessfully tried to start up an maintain some websites about anime characters and all, I decided that I should go for something less serious and light. I decided to blog. I bought the domain www.astrobunny.net and finally had wordpress and all set up on 19th April 2007.

The picture above you see is the first banner the first theme had. The theme was named Rustica. It was modified pretty often before that, and I still have the source pictures of those banners, but they are somewhere in my endless pile of backup DVDs. I remembered that it took me hours and hours to find a theme for my blog. I sat from the afternoon through night just looking for themes. I ended up settling for something really simplistic. The Nagi and Lucky Star character vectors were all done by me back then, because I had a lot of free time. I loved vectoring then, but I didn't get very good at it. It was something that kept my mind occupied while I continued to procrastinate against finishing an assignment that was due in 2 weeks. You could also see that I was an extremely big fan of Haruhi at the time.

I was an university student back then. This meant that I had a LOT of free time. Like, by a lot, I mean the weekends, all day Friday, and pretty much most of the day for the rest of the week, excluding Japanese classes then that started at 9 a.m. and finished at 10 a.m. I was living a part of my life when I had the highest amount of freedom from responsibilities ever. The picture you see above was my very first LCD that I bought in 2006. This same LCD continues to serve me loyally today. The keyboard in the picture is still with me as a backup keyboard, now that I have switched to a new one.

So how did I come about to being astrobunny anyway? Well, it all started waay before I started blogging, when I drew lots of bunny pictures for a girl I liked back then. The first picture I drew for her was an astronaut bunny. I didn't get to be with her however ^^; I indulged myself in a lot of anime soon after that. Since I drew so many bunnies I thought that maybe this lonely bunny and I had something in common, thus I logged on with the name astrobunny on IRC for the first time, and the name stuck.

This is the second theme I put up for my blog, in around July of 2007. I felt that the old blog theme had gotten old, and thought I never was satisfied with it anyway. I accidentally came across this theme, named MushBlue, and modified the banner before I used it on the blog. The Reisen Udongein Inaba in the banner was produced from a little flash game that allowed you to mix and match clothes on various Touhou characters. It was really nice, but I couldn't find it anywhere on my DVDs. I'm sure I'll see it again somewhere. I didn't blog much soon after this period, because at this time, I met the girl that was going to be my girlfriend for one and a half years.

I put this theme up on a lonely christmas night of 2008. My life in university had ended, my girlfriend had gone back to Malaysia for the holidays, and so had most of my friends. So I spent that Christmas night alone with an iPod and a bottle of coke sitting in the city square, which was by the way, deserted at the time. Then, I thought that I should catch up on my blogging, and decided to head home and start working on it a little more. Even so, I didn't end up writing much. It was the start of a depressing time for me after my studying life ended and my working life started.

Around October 2008, I was playing around with Drupal, another CMS, trying to look for a more versatile CMS than WordPress. I was impressed with Drupal, and tried to use it on my labs site. I was excited, and changed the themes of my Labs and Gallery and this site to use the Garland theme, which was the standard theme for Drupal. Soon however, I became worn out, because Drupal was so complex, and many of its features and plug-ins don't just work. They require a lot of dicking around and hacking to work, and they usually conflict with many other plug-ins and sometimes even break the layout completely. To my surprise, I found no CMS that could rival the ease of use, cleaniness and power and versatility of WordPress. I found that I was far far more productive writing in this blog, than actually trying to figure out how to make Drupal work the way I wanted it to.

In the August of 2009, I stumbled across a theme that I would have come to fall in love with and eventually modify and turn into my own. This was the time I set up a local development server and started to modify this theme locally. This theme is called iTheme, and appropriately named too, if you knew what it looked like originally. This was the first theme I have ever modified extensively, and i went as far as changing the css styles to make the columns wide enough for my 500 pixel wide standard pictures.

It was also this time when I started to pick up on my blogging again, and started to resolve to continue finding way to keeping this blog alive, since ever since I started this blog, it has been a personal goal to maintain it over the long term, as long as anime continued to get better and better, I felt that I too, had to play my part and share with everyone the incredible joys of being in the world of anime.

Finally, at the beginning of this year in 2009, I felt that my sidebar had grown too long, and decided that it was time I split up the sidebars to two sides. This was facilitated by an already modified version of iTheme that had 3 columns. After having applied the appropriate modifications, I managed to create a theme that was not only similar to the image of my previous theme, but with another column! It was magical to me even though I did it myself.

So there you have it, a brief history of a blog that has existed for a brief period of time. To those of you who actually made it this far down the post, Thanks for reading, and look forward to more new things from me!

written by astrobunny \\ 2, anniversary, birthday, blog, blog pics, cake, history, themes, tsukasa