The History of SunnyNeo
We get asked a lot just how it is that SunnyNeo came to be. So we decided that we would make a little page telling the who, what, where, when, why of SunnyNeo.
The Plushie Guild (.com)
Originally, Marleen (anuarisa) ran a guild called The Plushie Guild. Kendall (faerieskater) was council on this guild with her and we started working on what we hoped would be the best guild website ever. Not only did it have the guild information, but would also be like a neo help site and would have graphics and such for members to use. We worked on this for many months, and had the site up and running at theplushieguild.com. We would just continue to add information to it, and had lots of plans for future things to add.
The start of a new site: SunnyNeo
After a little while things happened though, and Marleen thought it was best to close The Plushie Guild down. She went off and made her own private guild called Where the Sun Always Shines. She invited some original tpg members to her new guild. Marleen and Kendall decided to start thinking about what we wanted to do with all the hard work we had put into The Plushie Guild website. We decided instead of letting all our hard work go to waste we would start a neo help site with the information instead. We set our goal: to make it better than the websites that were out there at the time, with no false information, but in-depth guides. Also to make our site ad and spyware free so people wouldn't have to be scared that anything would happen to them.
We started thinking of what names we would want for the site. It has to be something easy to remember, with neo or neopets in it and also appeasing. After many MANY possibilities that we all came up with, the general consensus of us thought that SunnyNeo was the best option. Marleen then closed down Where The Sun Always Shines, and reopened a new guild for us called SunnyNeo. We started thinking about how we wanted to lay out the site and what the look of it would be. We wanted the site layout to fit the name we had thought of, so suns and the colors orange and yellow were thought of. But now to think of a color that went with orange and yellow... we decided our very pretty favorite shade of blue would be best ;) And thus Kendall got to work designing and coding the layout. Many weeks and changes later, Marleen and Kendall finally had a design and layout they approved of and got to work moving the pages over and starting on new pages.
Mindlessinvalid's closing
Things continued in this manner for a few months. Old pages were being moved to the new layout, new pages were being made, the guild members helped and made some new pages or edited and spellchecked the ones that had been done. All this time Angela had been running MindlessInvalid.com.
She had talked to Kendall about how she was thinking of finding a staff to help her out since she never had time to do anything for MI anymore. After about a month of her not really wanting to find a staff, she poked Kendall and suggested that if she wasnt so busy she would just ask Kendall to help out with MI. Kendall said sure why not, I can do that and work on SN stuff at the same time. So the MI staff was then Angela and Kendall. Well it didnt take long for Kendall to realize she stunk at making fonts :P (about a month) and Angela never had time to make them, so one day Marleen said 'oh I'll help make fonts', and started making some fonts we were behind on. Angela liked them and asked Marleen if she then wanted to come help out with MI as well. So the MI team was now complete. While Kendall and Marleen were working on MI, SN kind of got pushed to the backburner and didn't get worked on much. Angela kept hinting to Kendall that she was needing to close down MI because of some financial situations, but then always managed to come up with it and not have to close MI down. Then finally one month, she put her foot down and said that it would need to close the following month. So the existing SN crew got busy getting SN ready for launch. Angela didn't want all the hard work she had put into MI over the years to go to waste, so we thought it would be best to incorporate all the fonts and things that MI had into what we had going on with SN, and the merging sites process began.
SunnyNeo opening for public
We worked diligently day and night, night and day... actually no not really, we all had things like school and work XD but we did work really hard :P and finally we had the new site ready for launch on August 20th, 2006. We had a rough start, within the first few days of launch we had to find a new host already. Lu (from avlog) had introduced Kendall to the wonderful world of php, and how we could have all our navigation links in one file for easier updating, and so the site was converted to php instead of html. However the host we were on did not like php ;-; and within like a day we had used our php limit, so we switched back to the html version of the site until we could find a new host and get moved. It didn't take long and within a day or two, we had all the files moved over and the new host up and running. Things worked out well at the new host for a few months, then we all of a sudden were told that we used up too much of that server's resources D: and that Kendall either had to pay $120 a month for a dedicated server or no longer have hosting :( So we went in search of yet another new host. This was a fun task indeed, since Kendall had no clue what kind of resources we had even used up. We didn't pass our bandwidth or diskspace limit, so what could we have used? Turns out there is some inner clause for host sites that say you can only use up such and such amount of server resources for such and such amount of time x_x We had gone over that limit by A LOT. We found a site though that used a different type of server technology though and hoped that we wouldn't use up too many resources on this one, and made the move again. We have now been mostly happily on the new host without any major issues since then.
And that is the joyous exciting history of SunnyNeo :).
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