About This Website

I never planned this website. It just, somehow, happened.

I got my Internet connection back in 1999. As customary, there was some webspace attached to it. It was there whether I decided to use it or not. Needless to say, I decided to use after less than two months.

I gathered my first HTML knowledge from the web and constructed a pompous entrance. In a frameset playing the Blue Danube Waltz you were guided via auto-refresh through various more or less witty greetings to a page showing two heavily underexposed pictures of me drinking wine at a party, and some links.

It was like a grand show staircase leading nowhere.

Over time, I put up some texts I liked, mostly poems, and thought of creating a kind of online library. I put up some Windows tips and started a computer timeline. But what grew fastest was the links section.

I think everyone goes link crazy in their first year on the web. And I found that putting up links on my website was far superior to storing them as bookmarks. They were accessible with any browser I chose to use, they were still there if I ever formatted my hard drive and reinstalled, and I could add some comments.

At first I had a single links page. I would group this links in topics, and if a topic grew large enough I would put it on a seperate page.

Actually, this whole site grew out of a single links page. And what grew fastest, was the games section.

Of course, some severe restrictions usually apply to this kind of webspace you get from your ISP. In my case, they are:

• I am limited to 10MB. I repeatedly had to delete things to make room for others.
• The URL of my site is dependend on my Internet connection. If I ever change providers, or leave the country, it will be gone. I cannot have my own domain unless I pay extra, and for what I'd have to pay, I can get better hosting.
• The only kind of automated feedback I can get is a single hit counter I can place on a single page. I have no access whatever to the server logs. The only hint I get which topics are more popular than others is the occasional email I get. The only way to find out who links to me is to google for my name. Since it's part of the URL, this usually works.
• I cannot use anything but simple HTML and client-side stuff like JavaScript, which I avoid. Not even server side includes (SSI). Take these little buttons at the bottom of the page, for example. If I ever want to add or remove one, I have to do it manually on every page. With SSI, I'd just change the text of a single file.
• I cannot have a custom 404 page, so people who encounter a 404 error won't know whether my whole site has vanished, or just this one page, or what. And I cannot have server redirects to prevent such errors in the first case.

It was, at first, mainly the size limit that caused me to get a domain and some professional server space in spring 2002. At first, I used it mainly for downloads which would have taken up too much space here, like the Mack & Blue graphics for RPG Maker 2000, and some rather voluminous mirrors.

It was not yet a website, and I was not sure what kind of website it was going to be. For a while I considered the name "Svatopluk Explains it All to You", and thought it might be a general help site for people confused with computers and the Internet.

But in spite of that all, and though I had only some not very prominent links on this site, traffic began to grow.

It was not until May/June 2003 that I earnestly started turning it into a website. I gave it an index page, naming it "Svatopluk's Game World", and traffic soon began to skyrocket. June saw less than a thousand visitors, July three and a half. As I am writing this (2003-08-14), July totals have already been surpassed for August, and I have now as many visitors daily as I had in all of May.

Now what does that mean for this website here? No, I will not take it down, nor completely neglect it. Some people do link to it (I'm proud to say that they all discovered it by themselves), and it has a good standing with search engines. Google, I think, now indexes me something like once a month.

I still update any page with obsolete info, and I might be adding new pages now and them, like, for example, this one. If I completely redo a section, I will usually put it on King Svatopluk's Court, as I'm finally gonna call it.

And until I lose this webspace because I change providers (which might happen some time), this site will stay up. Parts of it may become a kind of portal for the new site, just as I currently don't have a what's new section there yet and post all changes here. Mainly, it will turn more and more into what in its core it always was: A personal homepage.