Looking Back: Swamp Island

Swamp Island was a website which in my mind started when I started dicking around with websites. Which the best estimate of a time frame was around March 2004 and possibly even January of February. Especially considering I remember posting the DS press release (the original one before it got a name) and I’m pretty sure that was released early in the year. Also by then my site had already picked up- and used Publisher based layouts.

The first ever page I could say which I’ve utalised on the internet was a simple white page with a tag board inserted, I do believe the page featured no align tags of any sort- and the whole design was essentially left aligned. The white page also contained under the tag board lots and lots of links and buttons to various websites which “blog rolled” your website for you if you ad their button. Above the tagboard there was a simple thing saying “Hi I’m Trent, I like harvest moon”- not exactly those words but something to that effect.

For those stuck in the web 2.0 world, a tag board or a shout box had many names and was essentially a 150 by 300 or so small iframe box which contained a forum on the bottom of the tag board which you could write your name, email, website and comment. Above this would be all the comments from people who had came to the site.

You could customize these only down to the design and width and height, the website which I got the code for it would also have options for having it in various positions and styles as well.

I think the site was like this for quite some time- and possibly I even made another Geocities site for what was going to be swamp island after that- I’m not to sure.

The site contained a few articles and postings, as well as a few bits of content for Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (Game Cube) once it got going- I think I used a few free designs for awhile before I started to make them using Mircosoft Publisher- why I was making websites using publisher I have no idea. But they where essentially cut and past designs which featured a banner and some horrible border design. Basically if I had bothered to learn HTML would of looked much better etc.

I think for the most part I’ve forgotten most of the things about this site- but on the same token their isn’t much to say.

It did feature the DS as soon as it was announced so I’m pretty sure the site had been running longer then that- or least it was openned with the DS in mind- its quite confusing time line wise, all I remember is adding the DS after posting the press release and then slowly removing my AWL content or forgetting about it before I then moved onto the Nintendo DS completly and while my affiliates for the most part where Zelda and Harvest Moon sites I did in the end use the back bone of what I’ve collected for the next project and it kind of just stuck like that over the year.