About Rachel.nu

Rachel.nu is a domain I had been eying since probably about 2009. It was unavailable, so I was forced for forget about it, and I bought various other domains for blogs and fanlistings. In May 2011, Georgina alerted me to the fact that this long-coveted domain had finally become available. This conveniently came at a time when a large portion of my domains were expiring, so instead of renewing those, I decided to purchase Rachel.nu.

My Webdesign Story

Like many others, I got my start on Neopets.com. I joined Neopets in 2006 after my last day of eighth grade, after I heard a couple of girls talking about it at school that day. At the time, I thought that when people coded, they coded each individual pixel of their graphics, so I thought web designers were geniuses, and I told people so when they asked how it was done.

Not long after I joined Neopets, I discovered their HTML tutorial. I read through the whole thing while taking copious notes, which I never looked at again. After reading the tutorial, I used extremely basic HTML to do things such as edit my userlookup and start a small Neopets Guild. At this point, I was thirteen.

At some point after this, when I was in ninth grade (2006/2007), I learned to position existing divs and change the text properties in them, though I still didn’t know how to create my own. I began making Neopets userlookups in Microsoft Paint, and later in a trial version of Paint Shop Pro. I decided to open a Neopets graphics website with my friends Shannon and Rae. It was called Smile-Tastic Graphix and was hosted on Geocities.

In 2007, my friend Sharpie, who I knew from Neopets, helped me fill in the gaps in my CSS knowledge. He showed me the code of one of his userlookups and answered any questions I had. I found the code easy enough to understand and picked up on it pretty quickly.

After sufficiently “completing my knowledge” of CSS, I opened a website called Lavender Twist, hosted at Freewebs.com. There I posted some Neopets resources such as userlookups and one-column petpage layouts. By this time, I had also gotten Photoshop CS3 and had greatly improved my graphics-making skills. At this point, I was fourteen.

In December 2007, I stopped updating Lavender Twist and disappeared, without warning, from the amateur design community. However, during my absence, I did create a website for my robotics team in January/February of 2008.

When October 2008 rolled around, I decided to go back to owning a website, but since I had quit Neopets during my absence, it was time to change the focus. I decided to make a pixel site, so I chose the name Woolisauce, which I thought was a cute and fitting name for such a site. I shopped around for a satisfactory free host, since I was sick of Freewebs’s ads. I eventually decided to host my new site at 110mb.com.

After a few months, I became friends with Georgina, and she offered to host me on a subdomain: woolisauce.heartdrops.org. Naturally, I accepted her offer.

I eventually decided that I wanted my own domain, so I looked into hosting plans and bought from Parade Hosting. The package I purchased came with a free domain, so I moved to Woolisauce.net.

I stayed at Woolisauce.net for just under two months, and in that time I became upset with Parade Hosting’s server downtime. I also became tired of the name Woolisauce. Since I had won three domain credits from a Namecheap trivia contest on Twitter, I used one to register BrokenFall.org. Additionally, I learned about the now defunct Cyber Global Hypernet and their free hosting plan from Liz, which I used to host my new domain.

I stayed at Broken Fall for over a year, although I often neglected it during the school year, and especially toward the end of my final year of high school. After I graduated, I decided to open a new website. I was sick of Broken Fall and also felt guilty about all the times when I neglected it, so I registered Rachelisms.net. I stayed at that website for about a year, but I only kept it updated for the first six months.

Right about the time when Rachelisms.net was expiring, Rachel.nu became available. I missed blogging immensely, so I decided to move and start fresh. Here I am!