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-= and a site history =-

What is a "GordeonBleu"?
"GordeonBleu" is based on a nickname given to me by my band teacher Mr. Angelo and my friend Andrew Mascarenhas in 1997. I was called Gordon Bleu, inspired either by a musician's name or a French word, to avoid naming confusion with another boy in band, Justin Gordon. Andrew brought it a step further and began calling me Gordeon Bleu. Coincidentially, my favorite color happened to be blue at the time, but that had nothing to do with the name.

So why is the history of my site relevant to the 'about me' section? GordeonBleu is my main online presence. It's my space on the Web, a medium through which I have grown rather comfortable expressing myself. So here's a glimpse of how I arrived at where I am today.

The History

1998

GordeonBleu, before known as Dinosore's Homepage and Dinoworld, was first created on November 22, 1998. I was asking my friend Brianna (at the time, alias: Duckiqueen) about making websites in the fall after her introducing me to HTML in the summer that same year. I didn't have any plans for my new website, but I signed up for a GeoCities account under "dinosore". The very first URL was geocities.com/TimesSquare/9722/, which I no longer own. I started by making a very basic website with barely organized links. My first two sections were StoryCorner and SimCity 3000. By the end of 1998, I still did not know enough HTML to hand code, so I relied on novice web building tools like GeoCities' fill-in-the-page-properties builder. For months, my site remained with a crude design and no purpose.

1999

Fortunately, I learned some basic HTML things like font features and hyperlinks beginning in December 1998, starting with the font formatting tags in the SimCity 3000 online bulletin boards. Having a growing interest in this, I began to learn more through the viewing of other sites' source codes and lots of editing and testing, and by February and March 1999, I could write my own pages from scratch, code only. Then one day in April 1999, I discovered that the company network had blocked access to the TimesSquare section of GeoCities. Not wanting to abandon my website, I decided to move and remodel my site. I was able to do this because I had all my files on my computer where I would edit them. So I moved it to geocities.com/SiliconValley/Code/4098/, which I no longer own. And since I was moving my website, I thought that I might as well remodel it too. So I remodeled the entire thing using my newly developed, but still relatively basic, HTML skills.

This change was phenomenal, and the compliments encouraged me to continue to make changes. In 1999, I did the most experimenting with different layouts. I tried the graphics button format, the icons format, and the left-side table navigation format. I used black as a background throughout my homepage to make the colors on the page brighter, and as I played around with colors on my pages, I began to move towards green-on-purple and yellow-on-purple. (See Fig. 2, Fig. 3, and Fig. 4)

In August 1999, all of GeoCities was blocked by my ISP. I was forced to move my website once again, but this time to another portal - Tripod. (At some point around this time, I also experimented with a range of free homepage sites because there was such a large amount of them in 1999. Among these were Homestead, Xoom, and Angelfire.) Since I was relocating my homepage to Tripod, I also redesigned my index page, creating a start page more compact and organized. The new site was at: members.tripod.com/dinosore2/, which I no longer own. Little did I know that I was going to have to relocate my homepage again because of more blocking of sites by my company ISP.

Although I wasn't able to access my homepage on Tripod, I could still access the editing pages on Tripod, so I decided not to move and instead upload my pages without viewing the pages online. It didn't matter that much that I could not see my pages online because I already did all my editing and viewing of my pages on my computer, and then uploaded them online. Still, this situation discouraged me a bit from working on my site, so I redesigned it so that minimum maintenance was required. For months after that, I only occasionally updated and even when I did, the changes were usually miniscule.

2000-2001

I decided to stick with this neat, organized design (see Fig. 3), but after four months I had seen dramatic changes in the homepages of friends all around me. I felt left behind with no new content or design. So, in February 2000, I remodeled once more. (See Fig. 4) I removed my graphical interface completely and used the common left-side table for links. But I still didn't like it that much. It needed a totally new look - in colors. Sooo....in March 2000, I used my favorite combinations of colors of blue and created a neat, organized site. (See Fig. 5) Around this time, I changed my domain one last time to geocities.com/gordeon/. I still wanted to use the icons I had made in 1999, so I included them in the left-nav bar, and that was a bad decision, for it made the page look clumsier. (See Fig. 6) On July 2000, I decided that to base the homepage name on the URL (gordeon) and my AIM name (gordeonbleu) and my 7th grade band nickname (Gordon Bleu). I used a dark blue background with brighter blue tables with cleaner lines, created a logo that finally matched the color scheme, and renamed it GordeonBleu. (See Fig. 7)

2001-2002

I used this first GordeonBleu design for more than a year, and then on May 2002, I announced that I was changing the design. By July 2002, I had switched to lighter, softer shades of blue, had begun to heavily use CSS, and had redesigned my logo. (See Fig. 8)

2003

During May and June 2003, I decided to try to change my image and move away from the tables layout that I had stuck with for such a long time. I imitated the design of Corbis.com and created a scrolling navigation line of images with a soft white-grayish look. I also designed a new GordeonBleu logo that looked remotely like brushed metal. And I tried to create a dreamy effect using photo art and lots of white space. (See Fig. 10). In October 2003, my obsession with Apple and its ad campaigns inspired me to change all the navigation images. (See Fig. 11). I also finally decided to stop worrying Netscape compatibility and instead designed for Mozilla Firebird compatibility.

2004

There was no major redesign of the front page in this year. I only made slight tweaks and enhances to make the page load faster. My focus shifted to redesigning the other various sections in GordeonBleu, as well as completing the transition of every single page to Firebird/Firefox compatibility. Throughout the second half of the year, I created some rough drafts of possible redesigns for the main page, but I had trouble actually making them digitally. In October, I began creating a higher-bandwidth, ads-free mirror of the entire GordeonBleu site at www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~gordeon, which is never intended to replace the GeoCities domain for various reasons. In December, I began to look for ways to replace only the navigation images (and leave the rest of the page design alone), possibly with swappable external CSS stylesheets.

2005

In January, I began to work on the green navigation image replacement for the main page, but I ended up creating a new logo and color scheme for Imagine. The color scheme was hard on the eyes when it came to the readability of the text, so I decided to leave Imagine's look as it was. Finally, in February, I decided to drop my attempts to use images, and I instead created new navigation images using text. The rest of the page's look remained the same. (See Fig. 12) Towards the end of August, I finally redesigned the navigation portion of the main page from one of my rough drawings. (See Fig. 13) I created a wall of frames using the lines and color fill tools. With it, I used HTML image maps, something I hadn't ever used on any of my official pages.

This design move marked the end of my long unofficial policy of restricting visually appealing web design to only minimal graphics and the web-safe color palette. I had been inspired by the multitude of CSS-heavy sites by graphics designers, and I set new goals to move the GordeonBleu pages in that direction.

2006

It was during this year that I completed the transition of every active page of GordeonBleu switching over to W3C-compliant XHTML 1.0 Transitional, as well as the very last of the overhauling of table-based layouts in my legacy pages to div-based layouts. Then GordeonBleu saw a hiatus as my time shifted to my website work for other people, first with the nonprofit startups The Berkeley Project and SF Young Playwrights Foundation in August, and the Open Computing Facility in June and October.

I was working heavily on improving my techniques in Adobe Illustrator, which I had begun using for the first time in November 2005, and applying them to various t-shirt designs I submitted at Threadless.com during the bulk of the summer. My joint entry with my friend Brianna inspired us even more in the graphic tee area. I also had the opportunity to explore more vector artwork use with the tee designs for the Berkeley Project and the OCF in October and November respectively.

By November, I felt that my ideas for my personal site here had been shelved for too long, and I redid the frames theme on my front page into vectors using Illustrator, although I still had to display the final artwork in raster format anyway. I moved away from pastel colors and added a touch of gloss, somewhat in a subtle manner as to not fall into the trap of overuse of glossiness in the current webdesign trend.

2007

During the first half of this year, I again had to divert my time away from GordeonBleu, as I became even more involved in classes, as well as site and graphics work for the OCF and the Berkeley Project. In April, Brianna and I launched Monstercyb.org, a joint site and our first domain ever. In August, I finally found the time to finish building my portion of the site with full stylesheet switching and the same CSS2 + XHTML compliance treatment I gave all the external sites I had been building or rebuilding.

Additionally, during the beginning of the summer, I came onboard the nonprofit startup Teach It Well, and agreed to use any extra time I had to help out with finding a new look for for-profit startup Notizi. Both of these were still in progress through the end of the year.

By November again, I realized that I had not had time to implement changes with GordeonBleu that I had been long planning, and I finally redid the HTML image map on the front page with CSS, which finally allowed me to create the lightswitch (via swappable stylesheets) that I had meant to do a year earlier.

2008

In July the previous year, I had discovered a script that could export Xanga to Wordpress, and by February 2008, Brianna and I decided to migrate to different weblog systems - her to a Wordpress installation at Monstercyb.org, and me to my second oldest blog account - LiveJournal. By centralizing, I was hoping that I might find time for the rest of my projects, including GordeonBleu.