The Making of Pinoy Teens – part III

First off, while it’s hard to deny that Erik and Sarah count to my most appreciated singers, I’m glad to let you know that there’s no Jed Madela, and certainly no Christian Bautista who’s going to be added to the “Champions” list of singers that I listen to.

Let’s move on now, shall we?

Just a quick recap though, in the first post of this I don’t know how long it’s going to be series, I revealed that I am a Popster – but most importantly, I pointed out there how it all started, how I landed on the web and decided to create things online.

The second post was a rather brief prequel to the first one, in which I shared how I became friends with Princess (the first) and Izy who along with me make up the very foundation of the first Pinoy Teens that we launched in 2007.

This one? Well, let’s see what this one is going to be all about! 🙂

Pasaway Kingdom, “Philippines portal to the world” was a fairly successful forum, like I may have noted in an earlier post. It exceeded our – very shallow – expectations in a way that it started to overwhelm us. You could say that I was very active then, I mean, very active. I’d visit other forums, “advertising forums” and invite members from there to come over, I’d even send out chain messages on Friendster to have them join us.

All seemed in its place and doing well, until the numerous downtimes and hack exploits tore us apart, slowly but surely. People would get tired to sign up again, start the same threads over and over… Some would not want to start with “zero post counts” while others would not want to waste another 15-30 days until another hack when all their efforts would be deleted from the cyberspace.

In the process of looking for answers, and even further personalizing the experience at Pasaway Kingdom (which was NOT yet pasawaykingdom.net, but just some lazy .cjb.net extension), I discovered ddboard.com. A forum that’s been giving away domains for free. Well, sort of. You had to be active on their board for a certain period of time and had to attain a certain number of points and posts to redeem a domain of your choice.

While roaming the forum and posting on it, I’ve learned a lot of new stuff. I got my first glimpse into the world of PHP, JAVA and other programming languages. It felt so foreign to me that it made me sick. I sticked to less complicated sections on the forums, like talking about Search Engine Optimization and stuff.

My Pentium 4 Windows XP then, was unable to support any of my favorite online games (hello dial up, and hello crap processor), so I’ve had all time in the world to focus on what I have been doing so far.

It was on DDboard when I first discovered the word, “blog” and “blogging”. I didn’t knew what that was all about, I didn’t even really care about then. I saw people writing articles and stuff, but it looked too tiresome for me. I decided to stick with the forum thingy for now and let the idea of making Pasaway Kingdom a blog slip.

I did however, start editing HTML templates. Yeah, HTML templates. I got some templates off the internet and uploaded them to my hosting account and just edited the default text – that’s all I knew. CSS? What’s that? (even today I’m no master at it) XHTML? Say what? I’m not a guy with outstanding creativity, so I sticked with the basics.

One of the most memorable scenarios then was when I asked the stupid question why “index.php/htm/html” or “home.php/htm/html” is always the first thing that the visitors get to see. I had no idea why, seriously! It was just later on that I realized that it was sort of standard to have index or home files be seen first by the visitors. That’s how narrow my understanding was then.

Anyways, after using DDboard for over a month, I finally got enough points on the forum to avail of a few domains. God, I know, my first ever domain sounds kind of awful… pasawaykingdom.net.