That’s right, this little hole in the wall website has been around for a whole decade! Call out from work, school, or whatever you have going on and get ready to party!
No, actually, don’t do that. Be a responsible person and continue your normal life. Seriously though, it has indeed been 10 years to the day since I decided “Ya know what, I need a website, it’s what all the cool kids have!” Okay, it wasn’t so much like that either, and while I have had various sites over the years on those free hosting sites that come and go, nothing has been anything like Xadara.
I won’t bore you with too much of a history of the site, as I did cover that 5 years ago (during the “almost no images” phase of the blog) but perhaps a slightly condensed version will do well for you.
Xadara started as, of all things, a simply place to host files I made for a Dance Dance Revolution style game I was working on, based on well known open source software. I still have this data, but I’ve taken it off Xadara proper, and long since stopped work on the game and left the community for the most part.
The site also had a forum set, for discussion and the like, since those were still rather popular at the time, and I kept a pretty nice community around for a while, us just talking about pretty much whatever. For a few years things were fine, until one night I kind of accidentally gutted the database. Oops! I was able to somewhat recover but it was too much damage, and I scrapped the whole thing.
For a while I believe the site stayed mostly dormant – at that time I was still in the music game scene and I wanted to advertise the game, so I set the site into a more traditional format. I think at this time I indeed had started what would become the blog nature of the site, but the core of the site was devoted to the music game project.
Ah, the Portal cake. Gotta love it.
After maybe a year like that, I would give up and the blog would eventually take over. This would be about the 5 year mark – from that point on, while I would try some additions, such as another few attempts at forums, the site structure and nature would focus on blogging style content.
At this point I would have quite a few things happen in my life, all of which would be better events in the long-term. When Xadara started, things weren’t so great. I’ll spare details, but just keep that general idea in mind. By 2013, things had gotten quite a bit better, and at this phase I was focusing heavily on YouTube. I’ve vented about this before, but to keep it simple, YouTube is far too much effort for too little reward. I got burned out, and that’s when it hit me – I should focus on the site itself, and writing.
Sure, YouTube has its benefits, but so does the text format that blogging is by its nature – they contrast quite well and both have their flaws, but I felt that writing on my own site is just the better option in the long term, so, after a few years of spinning my wheels, so to speak, on YouTube, I switched up to attempting to write close to an article a day every day, where possible.
Amazingly, I’ve been pretty good at keeping up with that rate. I have skipped some longer time periods, sure, but from about May 2016 onward, I’ve just taken it as it comes and written about whatever, whenever. Well, at least as much stuff as I can, anyway. Some days are better than others, sure, and some articles certainly show me having to force them, but still, I try my best to cover what I can when I can.
The reason? Well, that’s for another article. More are coming, stay tuned.
Yeah, I’m just going to keep saying that. Stay tuned.