Whether you’re a long time member, or someone who just dropped in straight from Google, you are probably wondering what this site is all about. The short answer is that it’s about me - James Panther
About the Author
Born James David Panther, on the 15th November 1984, I’m an undergraduate student at RMIT University. I’m currently studying the final year of a Batchelor of Business in Business Information Systems. I also work full-time in the IT Industry at a well known private school. I live in Melbourne, Australia and this website is pretty much a hobby, telling of the events that happen in my life.If you want to know more about JamesX, read on…
Site History
Whether you believe it or not, this site has been running for quite a few years now and it’s taken on many forms over its life. Below I’ve mocked up some screenshots of what the site used to look like as you wander through memory lane.
It all started way back in the late 90s when I began mucking around with Internet technologies and concocted my first website. You’ve obviously been around for the long haul if you can remember what this page looked like. Strangely enough, the site made use of Macromedia Flash technology for the navigation and it was a place where I hosted jokes and random things that I found on the Internet. It was far from exciting, and the colour scheme left a lot to be desired, but it was fun and kept my friends entertained.
After a little while, in 2000 I launched a new theme and the site became known as The Pudge. The name came from one of my mates at school who used to use the name “Pudgey” to describe things. It was the first time I moved away from purely static HTML pages and started to delve into the richness of online scripting. At this time my knowledge of these languages was somewhat limited to I stuck to simple things like web polls and guestbooks that had generally been around for quite some time. The site was hosted by Ausgamers and amazingly is still there today! So the screenshot you see here is 100% authentic. I retained all the fun stuff and added a new section with theatre jokes and information to try to attract a few more people to the site.
The Pudge survived until February 2002 when the hosting package I was using really wasn’t able to supply me with the server tools that I needed to expand my growing site. But that’s to be expected when you aren’t paying for the hosting in the first place. Since a move was in order, I put on my thinking cap and went on the hunt for a domain for my site to be hosted on. Like anyone who’s ever tried to think of a domain name before, it’s a challenge to pick one that both encapsulates what the site is and is also easy for visitors to remember. It was then that PantherX.net was born! In my haste to get the new domain up and running I opted for a quick and dirty installation of PHP Nuke which looked very bland indeed, compared to the sleek look of The Pudge.
Nuke survived for about two months while I was busy working on a new design. For a while I had been hosting a small site on my server at home where I kept an online diary. It was a private diary that very few people had access to and it was here that my blogging life began. One of my friends, Alex, was just starting to play around with a product called Movable Type and I looked on with interest to see what it could do. Movable Type is still around today, but it’s not completely free anymore and for about four months it ran what was to become the foundation that created JamesX today.
While the underlying code behind Movable Type was PHP based, it built upon it by generating pure HTML pages after running the data through a cumbersome templating system. The design part of me wanted more freedom and it wasn’t going to come easily using that kind of setup. Google pointed me in the direction of a blogging package called b2, which is now known as Wordpress (I feel like I’ve been around a long time!), and within a couple of days I had moved all the conted from Movable Type across to b2. The site was called JamesX and ran out of a subdomain on my main PantherX site - james.pantherx.net. By now we were nearing the end of 2002 and the site was developing a somewhat cult following. People would logon daily to see what was going on and I had to keep thinking up new ideas to keep the content interesting.
From that moment forth, it’s been relatively smooth sailing from a backend perspective. The front end changed again in May 2004 when I created what I considered to be the best design yet. It’s also the longest surviving theme, lasting 16 months without major change. With the professional look, and the newly added Gallery section, the number of visitors kept increasing by the month. The site’s popularity grew exponentially and in June of 2004 we recorded the most hits ever; a whopping 107,270 hits for the month. 48% of those were from visitors outside Australia which was testament to the hard work I had put in over the years.
Around September 2005, it was time for a change and JamesX 5.0 was born. The layout kept some of the design elements of the previous design and made them cleaner. This version of the site also saw the return of the forums, which disappeared way back when The Pudge met it’s end. The forums brought about a three tier Wordpress-phpBB-Coppermine site with seamless login across all three sections (this was the real driving force behind the inclusion of the forums).
Just over a year had passed and I, once again, started to meddle with the design to introduce some new features. The forums never really took off, and so they had to go. The only problem this posed was dealing with all the back end integration and authentication that they were handling. Unfortunately this meant Coppermine had to go to, and so JamesX 6.0 launched in December 2006 sporting a new look, and a new Gallery. It was the first time in a long while that a number of new technologies were introduced; many of these are on the backend with the most noticable addition being Ajax searching and commenting. The site also features “header images” that change every so often to showcase some of my more exciting photos.Among my busy schedule, the challenge I face now is trying to keep a strong balance between the latest technologies and professional design. I work hard to keep this site at the standard it is. I believe it works. I hope you do too.