Happy Birthday to Maybedarkpink and my webpage!

[janedavitt]

maybedarkpink;hope your birthday is a happy day for you from start to finish ::hugs::

It's also a year to the day that my web page, the imaginatively titled Jane's Stories went up. Yes, a year since I spent a hideous few days wrestling with the complexities of doing a web page from scratch, unaided, with zero knowledge of, well just about everything.



It staggers me looking back. I knew nothing. I just didn't get the big picture at all. Every single one of my links pointed proudly at my hard drive and I couldn't figure out why no one could see the fics when I could ::blush:: Susan, I adore you beyond words for kindly fixing that for me.

It was a nice purple back then, with a picture of Spike on it. I carefully colour coordinated the page backgrounds to the story; yellow for yellow crayon Willow in my Giles and Willow in England fic, pale rose for a Valentine fic, an interesting shade of brown for my chocolate eyed Xander, and Kennedy meets the Eruman demon fics... Then it went yellow and the Spike picture changed and finally I went all minimalist (and saved a few hundred mouse clicks in resetting the colour every time) and it went black and white with some gorgeous banners for the stories and the front page from Ciel, psychodragon82,spuzz and sangpasssione, who also masterminded a huge overhaul of the site at Christmas and got it finally looking tidy and neat ::adores you all and will prove it with many smooches. Stand still::

One other feature is the counter. Dear, duplicating counter whose code Composer always screws up... I loved that counter. It told me beyond a shadow of a doubt that people, real people, from all over the world, were coming to my site and running away very fast reading my fics. Yes, I still bite my lips in impotent rage and suffering when I see that someone's got to the end of an epic (can tell by the link they used to get back to the home page) and they don't drop me a line to say how much they loved the story and want to give me a million dollars so I can hire a maid/nanny/cook/accountant and do nothing but write all day, but one learns to get accustomed to little disappointments like that. Everyone who did take the time to write; you're on my adore list too :;hugs galore::

Early days, not many people came. I didn't have an LJ and I was still hazy on the self pimping concept so I was writing for a small audience. And that went down by one when David stopped reading them after my first Buffy/Spike lip smush. I'd get seven visitors and walk around in a happy daze. Now I get about 150 hits a day and don't check it as much. Best day ever? Really early on, when herself rec'd a fic of mine and it got 500+ hits :;hugs her::. I think I had a 600 hit day too, but I don't remember why; end of Predatory Acts? Maybe. no, I'm not obsessed by it. Why do you ask? ::suspicious frown::

I also started doing a counter roll over fic when I went from 19,999 to 20,000 and such, giving the choice of pairing to whomever flipped it.I'm at the totally even number of...hang on, 63,604, but blocked though I am, I still have to write a birthday fic for my site, so whoever writes in first, I'll do you a fic of your choice.

David says that's a funny present to give someone, but I know my page will love it.