Anjoola's Website 
Site History
Anjoola's Website was not always the Pokémon and
video game-centric fan site that you see today! In fact, its
beginnings were rather strange and unexpected, and if you want to find
out more, read on!
This particular flavor of the website has been around since
2006, in anticipation of the release of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl.
Other versions have been around earlier, and below I will explain each
and every form that this website has ever taken!
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Part 1 Strange Beginnings
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I first got interested in making websites in third grade, when someone
did a book report about HTML (yes, strange isn't it?). I found a free web
host, called Geocities (now gone) hosted on Yahoo!, and used one of the
templates to make a website about... well, T*Witches. It's a book series
about these twin witches, and I made a fansite for it. Basically no one
went to the website, as it didn't really have anything, except some hot
links to my email and homepage. In fact, I'll have to admit, it was pretty
useless. But this was the first step to something
greater!
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Part
2 Cloud City's Wonderful Website
(CCWW)
Afterwards, I became interested in Neopets, which is a pretty
addictive online virtual pet game sort of thing. Well, on Neopets, there
were various custom things you could do, like making your own blog-like
thing for your shop, or your Neopets' own webpage. I thought I could
make my own layouts and let lots of people use them, so CCWW was born!
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CCWW stood for Cloud City's
Wonderful Website, since cloudcity was my username on Neopets.
Fortunately I used CCWW as the name, since Cloud City's Wonderful Website is a
mouthful! CCWW was a small website offering layouts, banners, buttons,
and all the general stuff that many other websites offered. It was very
popular and many people visited it for its many offerings.
CCWW went through many cycles and layout changes, and it was constantly
updated with new content. In fact, there was a time when the website
featured Torchic as its main character. But even near its end, it mainly
featured miscellaneous cute characters, such as Kaos and puffs, as well as licensed ones such as
Sanrio and Morning Glory characters.
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As middle school started, I began to have less time for my website, and
could not update it as frequently. Less people came to the website,
until I was sure I was the only visitor. I shut the website down and
began to concentrate more on school work.
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Part 3
Random Websites
Alongside CCWW, I made three very personal websites -- personal in the
sense that I was the only person to look at them. One of them was sort
of a diary of my trip to Hawaii, and I kept pictures and detailed notes
of everything I did. Another one was a diary as well, but this time it
was about a trip to Las Vegas with my family. I never completed that
website because I started to get lazy and didn't want to take pictures.
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Finally, I had a website about my trading cards. For a brief
amount of time during seventh grade, I was a huge fan of
Yu-Gi-Oh! and all of the trading cards (after a guy at school
gave me his entire deck!). I also had some random Neopets cards
from McDonalds as well as Digimon cards from way back when it
was popular.
I decided to create a website where I could record all of these
cards and have pictures of them. It was quite detailed, with an
index and links that directly went to each cards. I even had a
list of Pokémon cards that I wanted, but now luckily I've got
nearly all of them! The old website can be found here.
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These three websites were short term projects that I abandoned in a few
months. (In fact, I even created a very small website that had typed-up
poems and ditties from the Redwall book series. I made this when the
internet was down for a week...). With eighth grade homework to be done,
and high school about to start, I didn't have much time for anything, in
fact. So soon, these ended as well.
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Part 4
Anjoola's Website
Around the same time I made this personal websites, I also restarted
CCWW and called in Anjoola's Website. Actually, my name really isn't
Anjoola but there is a long story behind this... This time my
focus was Pokémon because I was getting back into gaming after my
parents let me buy the super special awesome Nintendo DS.
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I began some of the basic guides but did not have a lot of the
stuff worked out. It wasn't until high school, when I got a Wii,
that I finally dedicated a lot of time to the site. I also got
more into gaming and became familiar with the tiny details in
the Pokémon games. With help from some programming classes, I
was able to make better (I hope) layouts and give the site more
functionality.
Right before the Japanese release of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl,
I began the Custom Requests section of the site. This was a huge
success, and on some days, I had well over 30 requests to fill
out! These I will continue to do indefinitely until I really
don't have time to do it. Hopefully, that day will never come!
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Part 5
YouTube and Sheet Music
My interest in video games music started about the time when I was a
sophomore in high school. I stopped taking piano lessons and started
playing some songs I really enjoyed listening to from video games. If I
recall correctly, the first one I ever played was the Legend of Zelda:
Twilight Princess trailer song. From there on, I grew to love video game
music, and to this day, it is the only genre of music I listen to.
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Somewhere in the wide world of webs, I found a music editor, and
I found out how easily I could make the music I heard into
sheets to be played onto the piano. Thus began the sheet music
section of my website.
After I had made a couple of sheets, I began to realize that
many of them had not been performed on YouTube before, and I
thought this was my chance to gain a few moments of fame. I
started by creating a YouTube account and uploading my first
performance.
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At that time, I was playing Okami and was completely hooked into its
soundtrack. My first YouTube video ever was a beautiful song from that
game. Soon after, many videos followed, and you can view them all here.
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Part 6
???
Now in college, I am pretty busy with schoolwork. Where will my
website go? We'll just have to see...
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