Site History
Symphonic was born out of frustration. Well, not quite – I have long loved subjecting my opinions onto others and rambling pointlessly in the hope that someone else on the internet will read it and sympathise. This particular home for Symphonic, however, came about from an impetuous decision on my part. But first, you shall hear the long, detailed, and hopefully interesting account of how I came to blog.
My dealings with the internet and “websites” came about in I think three different ways, all at roughly the same time, back in 2005. I first discovered those little things you get with your MSN account – MSN spaces, and learned that you were supposed to do this thing called “blog” in them. I rather liked the idea of talking to the internet to let out all the things other people wouldn’t listen to (back then, I had no friends. Sad, but true). I “blogged” sporadically, and eventually forgot about it. I was going to link my MSN space for the lulz, but I found out that they cleared them all when they switched to Windows Live.
Then, there came Piczo, and I’ll loosely and dubiously call this part where I was introduced to “creating websites”. Wince. Anyway, a friend had a Piczo site, and I wanted to try it out. Although soon the designs were ripped off her, I took it a step further and started offering “tutorials” and “codes”. I also discovered “blending” and became a Piczo Pro. I had my own circle of little friends, who began migrating to Freewebs, and I saw this as a step up. I learned how to figure out CSS, and shifted over there.
At the same time, somebody else I knew had a MySpace which, in retrospect, they probably didn’t design themselves, but nevertheless, was awesome. I thought that this person actually did create their own layouts (although they probably only removed the link back), and I wanted to create my own awesome one as well. I began trawling through myspace layouts sites, copying the code and then meticulously going through it figuring out what each bit meant. This probably taught me nothing about clean, semantic coding, but I found out that I actually enjoyed it.
Anyway, all this converged onto my new Freewebs blog, and I started to learn how to do things properly. In September 2007 I got hosted by one of my former Piczo friends, in about November I switched to using WordPress as a CMS, and I slowly began to understand PHP.
All this came to an end very suddenly with a spell of bad luck. Without warning, my host closed down his site, and I lost most of my stuff. Within the month my computer crashed and I lost the rest. When I finally got around to looking for a new host after my GCSEs, I discovered that, unsurprisingly, nobody really wanted to host me without former evidence of knowing what I was doing, so I decided to leave it until after the summer.
In September 2008 I got back to designing and coding a new layout, and a friend very kindly offered to host me. However, to my annoyance, she managed to disappear off the internet, and so one day in a fit of rage (OK, slight exaggeration), I saw Ethan was offering hosting, and without a second thought asked him if he’d host me. Two days later, on my 17th birthday, I had everything up and running, and so in October 2008, Symphonic was born.
The Name
I chose the name “symphonic” mainly because music is such a huge part of my life. I know, profound. When I looked it up in the online dictionary, the third definition was “characterised by similarity of sound, as words” – and so that became my “tagline”.
I like to think that I have a musical voice, and therefore a “musical” blog… and since I’ll probably end up blogging about music a lot, it’s a good name. Also, while I generally dislike categorising music, especially since there is so much disagreement when categorising different aspects of metal music, in a broad sense, my favourite “genre” of metal is one commonly known as “Symphonic Metal” – which usually means that orchestral elements have been added. I hope I don’t spark off a huge debate with that now.