Epiphany
Epiphany was opened in December of 2014 as a Petz 5 exclusive site. I was a junior in high school then! I kept up the site until about May of 2015, and then lost interest, and the FTP login, sometime after that. I even put messages in the cbox about having abandoned this site:
I'd written off this site as a loss, and hadn't even thought I'd ever get back into Petz. However, in February of 2022 (7 years later!!), I was bored and decided to finally start that project I'd always wanted to do: make a Petz site archive à la Minibyte's Archive (which no longer exists). I ended up stumbling across Petz Discord while working on that, joined a few servers, and put in my introduction post that I used to own Epiphany. In a crazy stroke of luck, Epiphany's host Megan @ Oasis happened to see my post and offer me access again!!
So, here I was, 7 years later, finally updating Epiphany again. So much in my life had changed since then, it was surreal to be writing here after all that time. My old about me page was quite a trip to read!
Soon after regaining access to the files, I moved Epiphany to my own webserver. Petz will always be a core part of who I am, but at this stage in my life I don't have sustained interest in actually playing the game. I have my moments every few months where I hyperfocus on it for a week or two at a time, and as a result Epiphany has gone down or been broken a few times since 2022 due to changes in my server, and neglecting to check if Epiphany still worked. My current setup is a bit more stable, and Epiphany is very low maintenance at the moment, so hopefully that won't continue happening :)
Epiphany has had a few redesigns, the current version is inspired by Art Nouveau. Here are some other versions:
PC History
I first bought petz waayy back in the second or third grade at my school's book fair. I was hooked immediately! I still use that same copy of Petz 5, and I've tried other versions but Petz 5 will always be my favorite.
By the fourth or fifth grade I had discovered the pc. This is the first site I ever visited. I remember trying to adopt from it, not yet understanding the concept of inactive sites. To me, if a site was online it was active, and I was highly disappointed when my adoption never came! I wanted my own site too. I wish I still had those first versions of my sites to show you, but I can tell you they were pretty bad! I was only 9 or 10 at the time, and my HTML skills weren't the best. I learned the basics from a site called Lissa Explains it All.
I can't remember if any of my early attempts ever made it online or not. I don't think they did, but I had plenty of webs accounts over the years from various abandoned projects. I was never into petz enough to stay interested long enough to finish a site, so I had many half-finished projects over the years! The first name I can remember having was Somthin' Funny, and Epiphany's first layout is named after it. It seemed fitting to give my first successful attempt at a site the name that I started with:) Some other names I've had over the years were Maddilyn's Munchkins (I used to go by Maddilyn in the pc), and Starry Night K&C. I'm sure there were more but they were all so long ago I can't remember them. There was a pretty long gap during most of middle school when I wasn't into petz, and all my stuff from elementary school got lost.
During my sophomore year of high school (2013) I started getting into petz again. That's when I started on Maddilyn's Munchkins. I had a Tumblr by that name too, so even though the site never made it online I still had somewhat of an online presence in the pc. I got sick of that name pretty fast though and changed it too Starry Night K&C, though I can't remember if I ever changed the Tumblr. Pretty much all of this happened during christmas break, and once school started I got busy and lost interest. I ended up deleting the Tumblr.
Here's what Maddilyn's Munchkins/Starry Night K&C looked like. I had tried to do an inline frame layout at first, and couldn't get the frame to get in the right position (I still wasn't great at HTML). So I gave up and did regular frames. I also wasn't very creative with fonts or backgrounds (the background is from the Petz 5 web fun pack).
Now fast forward to the middle of my junior year. I was in an early college program now, and had some more time on my hands as I didn't have as many classes. I started getting into petz again when I decided to look through my giant folder of favorited petz sites to see if any were still alive, and surprisingly, the pc was still alive and fairly active! Once I started going through those sites, I got bitten by the "petz bug" so to speak. I opened up my game which had sat for a year unused on my computer and once I started playing I knew I had to come back. And thus, Epiphany was born!
In high school, I had this wall in my room that was covered with index cards, and they all had interesting word definitions on them. When I was trying to come up with names I looked through all the words on my wall, and epiphany stuck out to me. I was trying to find something that was easy to say/spell, and the word epiphany fits, because realizing that I was never going to completely leave the pc was something of an epiphany for me.
Obviously I got wayy better at coding when making Epiphany. When designing it I looked at other petz sites for ideas. Then it occurred to me to look at the source code of those sites to see how they did it, and that's how I learned the HTML to make Epiphany. Plus a lot of internet searches :) In the past I'd relied mostly on the one site, which was a bit out of date by the time I made Epiphany, especially design-wise. So thank you to the various petz sites that were still alive in 2014, I think Moonflower Petz and Litterz Factory especially were the two I looked at the most.