About Us
Crest of Hope: Patamon's World - bringing Digimon info to you from an Animaniac (=Anime maniac) in Australia!
What we try to do
I wanted to make PW the most comprehensive resource it could be, with all the info you'd find on any Digimon site, but I also wanted to make it different and original. That's why we have pages named after different Digidestined and strange names for the information sections. It's also why I've added things like theories, humour, random Javascript games and classifieds. I guess the mainstay of all this unusual information is the opinion articles and columns that have been written by me and other staff over the years. There was a time when all I wanted to do was to make it to first place on topsites, but that's died down since then and my main aim now is to get as much stuff as I can onto this site. I looked at my stats compared to some others, and realised that while I wasn't getting as many unique hits I was getting a lot more total pageviews. That suggested repeat visitors, and that's what I want now - people who love the site and will come back for more.
Crest of Hope: A History
It all started back in February 2001. I was 11 and a half years old, just starting Year 9 at school, and I already knew more about computers than my IT teacher. We'd just upgraded our computer to a 733 MHz Celeron, with Win98 SE and Office 2000 Premium. Now, if you know about the different releases of Office, you'll know that Office 2K Premium includes FrontPage 2000, and I got to know the program straight away.
Cut to early 2002. By then, Digimon had been screening on free-to-air TV for a year or two, but I'd never really watched it. I've always been an all-out Pokémaniac and I thought Digimon was just some cheap rip-off of Pokémon. Boy, was I wrong! I watched a bit of Digimon while waiting for another show to come on, and I was hooked! I watched it every week for months, and then I had an idea. What better way to communicate my new knowledge to the world, than to make a website?
That idea became Crest of Hope: Patamon's World. I set up an account with Netfirms and first published, using basically all placeholders, in June 2002. I left it there, as I had exams to worry about and heaps of schoolwork to do. I had absolutely no hits. At the end of November 2002, I came back to the site, and formally opened it on December 1, 2002. I worked really hard for about a month and got as much content up as I could. Of course, it's not finished yet. It'll never be finished - there's always more to add.
Since then, affiliates have come and gone, and a lot of people have joined the site as news updaters, article writers and forum mods. These days, I'm getting a couple of thousand hits a day, which puts me comfortably in the small-to-midsize Digimon site bracket.
A new chapter in PW's history started in late April 2004. When I reopened the Pokémon Peninsula, one of the things that people commented on at the Pokémon Community was the intrusive ads on Netfirms. After I explained that I couldn't pay for hosting, a member there, JKaizer (Greggy), offered to host both TPP and PW on his own personal hosting account! Thanks Greggyboo, I promise I'll repay you someday.
In November 2004, I graduated from high school; for some time before that, I'd been discussing a domain name with Shawn. That ended up not going through, but Greggy decided to give me a "graduating-way-before-your-time" present in the form of the domain ryux.net. With the domain name in hand, Shawn agreed to host me, so, well, now we have a heap of space and a heap of bandwidth. Which is pretty nice, you have to admit. ^^ We also had a lot of downtime, which *wasn't* so nice. Also around the end of November/beginning of December, there were a couple of newspaper articles about me mentioning PW, and this approximately quintupled (that's x5!) hits in just one day. o_O Which is really nice, you have to admit. It actually pushed PW to the highest it's ever been on the Digimon Super Top 100 and Big 50 Topsites...
PW had about a month of downtime through January 2005, but came back up and slowly tried to recover. Plus, February 20 2005 gave us something new... actually, technically Greggy gave us something new, but it was ON that date. Whatever XD. In any case, yeah, Greggy bought the forum its own domain... ^^
And then... yeah, Shawn struck again. More downtime, with no warning and no idea of when the server would come back up. So we waved goodbye to Shawn, and went back to Greggy. XD That was early June 2005. And so we go on and on and on and on and on and on and on.... on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and *whacks self* Sorry, that was GC :P
Although I didn't make any content updates between April and November 2005 (that's over half a year without - eek, let me go put my lunch in the microwave - k, I'm back - a real update!), I had been spending time converting the main part of the site (that means everything but the Digidex) to PHP. This involved recoding every single page, due to Frontpage's fugly coding. Somewhere during those months, my hard disk died with PW on it, and I lost several weeks while we ordered a new computer, configured it (I installed three operating systems -_-) and very slowly retrieved data from the dead disk, managed only with the help of HiKaizer's dad. I finally finished the recode just before my final first-year exams, and the major update went up on November 2, 2005 - with its own domain! Greggy and I had paid for a web hosting upgrade using the money I got from my sister for my birthday, and our host, Elixant, had a special on at that time which involved a free domain for the lifetime of the account, so we switched ryux.net to the lifetime one and I convinced Greggy to register digivice.net to replace it. ^_____________^ Also, a couple of weeks before this, we registered our 2 millionth pageview, which isn't too bad for a small site.
And now... it seems I'm updating again. XD
It's never nice to say goodbye to a friend, but many of the sites I once affiliated with closed down or stopped updating. Special thanks goes to Tim Casey, who's the webmaster of the Anime Edition. His Digimon section has now closed, but it was my first affiliate and the site that first promoted my website on the Net.
Milestones
(Hits counted from 1 December, 2002 - a hit is a pageview)
10 000 hits - Thursday 20 February, 2003
50 000 hits - Saturday 24 May, 2003
100 000 hits - Sunday 13 July, 2003
250 000 hits - Monday 15 August, 2003
500 000 hits - Friday 9 January, 2004
1 000 000 hits - Friday 4 June, 2004
1 500 000 hits - Friday 11 February, 2005 (the day GC played in Sydney at the
Channel [V] Studios)
2 000 000 hits - Friday 14 October, 2005
2 500 000 hits - Thursday 9 March, 2006
Next Milestone: 3 000 000 hits
