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-Beginnings
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When I originally though about this
website, All I had in mind was showing off the many pictures of
things like the pokémon characters (and other things such as the
maps) that I had collected over the years. But later, I realized
that each one of these pictures could be related to a city. |
| By putting the cities in order, I saw
that I could create something like an illustrated walkthrough for
my visitors. The idea of presenting this webpage as a tour company
came to me when I was playing the game and went through the Ice
Path. Someone in the game told me that many people come to the Ice
Path for skiing and stuff; it was almost like a touristic
attraction! |
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-The
Hoenn Section
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However, when I got to doing Hoenn,
I noticed that I hardly had any pictures for it! (The
people at Pokémon didn't want to release anything until the game was
out) Because of this, I was forced to
use mostly screenshots. Not to say that the screenshots are bad, but it
would've been nicer to have used more hand-drawn
"concept art" for certain things instead of screenshots.
It was very difficult for me to get these images. Certain images I had
to search the internet for, as I describe in the Notes
on Images Section |
| Since I was playing the game at the
time I was making the Hoenn
part of the website, I focused more on the "walkthrough"
aspect and added the Trainer Notes. I
later added some of these to the Johto
and Kanto as well in places where players might
get lost.
Later, I decided that I didn't need to
have a separate page for every single thing (like I did with the Johto
National Park). I remembered that I could link directly to a
part of the webpage, and that's what I did for the Hoenn
Battle Tower, for instance. |
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After creating the
Stadium section, it became sort of a problem for me to keep it up to
date due to the flash
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interface and to the fact
that I didn't have all the pictures for the Johto, Kanto, and Hoenn
sections and started looking for them as well. |
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-The
week before Summer
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In the week
of June 9th (the last week of school for me of that
year) I knew I wouldn't have access to the school's wonderful
computers and software programs during the summer vacations, so I
decided to "make the most of it." I dedicated most of my
efforts to changing the pictures that were "currently
unavailable" (which I put like that because at the moment I
published those pages, I didn't have access to the picture file) for
actual pictures that represented the point being discussed. |
It
was pretty hard - I mostly ended up using screenshots - but in some places,
where there was no way I could get a good picture, I had to use pictures
from sources other than pokémon; like I did with the Pokéseer in Cianwood.
Then, I had to add that to my Image Notes page, as
well as citing the source of the non-pokémon pictures.
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-Break
Time
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During the first week of
summer, I spent much time stubbornly
neglecting even looking at my page. Apparently, I was having way too
much fun watching TV all day, eating all I wanted, playing old video
games like SuperMario and things like that. When I finally came back
to my page, I realized that there was still loads left to do! |
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I tried to get back to
being as busy as I was during the week of
June 9th , considering that now I could work
full-time on my webpage if I wanted to. But what I wanted to do, was
add some new stuff. I wanted to put in something that wasn't planned
for. I had also been wanting, for a long time, to add in the
pictures I had from Pokémon Pinball. |
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It was then that I
decided to add the flash interface to the Johto
and Kanto maps. I also wanted to review what I
had done for the stadium section before going to finish it; that was
when I noticed that a few things needed fixing. In the midst of my
activity, I also created the newsletter and
the Guestbook |
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To spice things up a
little, I decided to do some slow and small changes to my then
current layout. I added a frame at the top with a "title logo
banner" because many people had suggested I made one. I
"converted" the contents menu into a categorized flash
because it was getting so long. and I put the radio
because I had always wanted to have some music on the site; plus, it
fit perfectly into that empty space below the contents. |
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-The
updates at |
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It was kind of funny to
watch Pokémon.com change its layout at almost the same time that I
was doing it, even though I knew it was bound to happen sooner or
later. The only problem was that all the links that I had to their
pages had to be adjusted.
A few days later, I was
finally able to get a hold of Pokémon Pinball and added the flash
interface to the Hoenn map.
By then I was running out
of ideas for what to add on to the page. It was then I sent out the
desperate cry for help saying that I was open for suggestions. |
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At that time was when I had the idea (it
seems I always have an idea at the right moment that gets me out of
tight spots) of reviewing all the
sections for improvements. The only bad thing about it was that
during that week I had so many updates that I had to issue several
Special Edition Newsletters. |
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-Pokémon
Goes to Europe!
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When
Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire came out in Europe, so did a bunch of new
pages on the internet sporting some pictures I had never seen
before! I recruited the help of a girl who called herself Sapphire
to edit some of these images. While she did the Team Aqua and Team
Magma leaders, I did the Hoenn map, which would've been too hard for
her.
Once
finished, I posted these on my website and |
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-Finally
something new!
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I
left the website a long time without updates, mostly because I
didn't have anything to put on it! I was waiting to see if more
information about upcoming games, like the Pokémon
Colosseum, would be released. Since after a while nothing came,
I decided to just put up what I had until then. It seemed to work
pretty well back then, and I just let it go.
I
spent some free-time talking with people about the Pokémon Advance
television show. While doing that, I discovered that a new
game was coming up. This time I didn't wait. Less than a week after
I found out about it, I posted the page on Pokémon
Water Blue and Fire Red! |
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On
October 13, I found a full scale picture of Officer Jenny. The whole
story is published on the Search
for Jenny page. After a while
of not really doing anything except constantly reminding myself of
the fact that I needed to put the picture up, I finally put my mind
to it. I had Sapphire edit the picture and then uploaded it.
With
Sapphire now on my team, I had to make a few adjustments in the way
I reported the posting of new images. I decided that I would tell if
she was involved in what I call the "Background clean-up
editing," which basically involves getting rid of the
background color and saving it as a transparent GIF that can be
placed anywhere without any problems. I do this with pretty much all
of my images, you'll notice. |
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-The
big Layout change
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Click the picture to see it larger!
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Many people had protested against the red-and-yellow layout I had before, so when I
acquired the "wonderful software" that my old school had (see
"The week before Summer") which made making new pages much easier, I thought it was the perfect time to change the layout. |
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The old
Colosseum page was a mess. It only said on what date I had discovered what information. I needed to re-make it in a much more organized way. I decided that I would make the new one using a new layout. I experimented a while with this,
until I ended up with what I have now.
After
completing the new Colosseum page, I needed to make a link to it from the
Welcome page because if there's no links to it, it's as if it weren't there. I remade the page so that it had the new layout and also
organized it a big more. |
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After sending the newsletter informing about the
Colosseum page and the new layout, I needed to update the newsletter
page. I organized it in a calendar-like fashion with icons which worked out a little
better than what I had expected. |
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-Hoenn
Again
| The release of a new series to the Pokémon anime
(Pokémon Advanced) made many new characters and images of them "appear." I tried to put the images that I had where I could, but
until the layout change certain ones remained off the site. |
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Exploring the Pokémon Japan website led me to finding many new great images. Putting these into
my website was a different issue, which took me quite a while. |
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