Making of Pinoy Teens part 4

Yep, pinoyteens.net was not the first domain that I owned, it wasn’t even close to that. I’ve owned a few others before it, like kevinpaquet.com and my very first one, pasawaykingdom.net. I don’t know, but I’m quite fond of .net domains.

I didn’t expect having our own domain is going to make a big impact to our forum, but it did. More and more people seemed to be getting on board and the return rate from some visitors was even higher. Getting a domain was the best thing that could happen to me on the internet.

Still, something was amiss, like the whole “Pasaway Kingdom” project seemed like a big, pointless joke. I think we have ourselves to blame, who started “growing up” and maturing along the way for that. We wanted to spell a difference online via the things we create, and our “just for fun” forum wasn’t that kind of site we were looking forward to.

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear Pinoy Teens?

I’ve asked that question around some boards midway 2007. A lot of answers made me want to hide or run away. Most of them would relate “Pinoy Teens”, “Filipino Teens” or stuff like that to scandals or pornography or other obscene stuff.

That’s how Pinoy Teens really started – as a simple goal to replace the odd and obscene results fronting the search engines with a more appropriate website that showcases the better side of the Filipino Teen.

Of course, we started Pinoy Teens as a forum. The membership we’ve had at hand already from Pasaway Kingdom was quite handy, though not all seemed to follow our idea and some sort of division happened between Pinoy Teens and the Pasaway Kingdom Forum.

As Pinoy Teens’ grew, we’ve had more foreign members who were of Filipino origin which was kind of cool. Hundreds of members joined our board throughout the rest of 2007, including a few starts from scratch because we got kicked a few times along the way from some of our hosts.

In 2008 however, one of the biggest mishaps took place. We got hacked. Facebook started sneaking in, and people just lost interest in rejoining the forum for yet another uncertain period until it gets bugged down again. Pinoy Teens was on the verge of breaking down… again?

My best friend, Princess, urged me to continue developing Pinoy Teens. It doesn’t matter how, or as what I’d develop it – she said that I would find my own path anyhow I did it. That’s how we finally settled with removing the forum once and for all, and replacing it with a blog in March 2008.

I have to admit, that even I have grown tired and restless (who wouldn’t?) of all the hacks, downtimes and so on that bothered our existence; yet with the presence of the two of them, and a few pioneer members of Pinoy Teens, we remained resilient and held on until we were sure Pinoy Teens could start to sustain itself already without too much work on our part.

Pinoy Teens – my first real blog in 2008 at the age of 17

I know people nowadays start blogging at a much younger age, lucky you, guys. Tools and all are being spoon-fed to the younglings in the blogging world today, unlike before were we had to take care of everything and were quite limited with the things we could do on our blogs.

Luck has struck me twice though, first when I started my blogging life with WordPress and second, when I won a premium theme of choice during a blog contest. These two events count to the best things that ever happened to me.

WordPress is quite the obvious choice for me as a blogging tool, it seemed less restrictive than blogger or any other platform that time and was something that I could consider of my very own making.

The premium theme, Revolution Pro Media, sheltered our blog for over 3 years (with a number of changes in between) it has grown on me so much that I never managed to settle for another theme, until I a theme, News 2.0 of the same theme author caught my attention late last year.

All was well in the first year of Pinoy Teens but I figured it would still be a long way to go to get to anywhere…