The following are the ‘dry’ stuff, or the ‘interesting’ stuff, depending on how you look at it.
1. This site was started in 2001, after the birth of my firstborn. It has gone through approximately 3 major changes since it started. It’s ‘birthplace’ was Geocities, which gave free hosting service. Later on, it moved to it’s current domain ‘www.parentingjoy.com’, and started using paid hosting service. Along the way, more features were added and changes were done slowly, bit by bit.
2. The first 2 ‘metamorphosis’ was done by me from scratch. Needless to say, they were amateurish attempts. Frontpage was used to create the original, rather crude, version of the site.
3. The current, more ‘pro’ look cannot be done without tremendous help from a web developer friend. The site needed a complete revamp after growing to a scale that was very tedious to manage with Frontpage. The design (if it can even qualify as a ‘design’) is mine. My web developer friend most certainly does better job at designing.
4. The revamped site was launched on 2 May 2005. It currently uses a Content Management System, which makes things so much easier for me.
5. The articles are written by me unless otherwise stated. Most of the images are mine or just clipart.
6. Before moving to a Content Management System, I used a lot more graphics from the following sources :
Since moving to this new sytem, I have tried to remove their graphics and replace them with my own images. There may be some that I have missed out; some that I cannot remember where I got them from. Hence, I am listing the graphic source here. Please visit these sites to take a look at their work. Ecomother has useful information onchildbirth, breastfeeding and pregnancy too.
7. There used to be a Parenting Joy Shop, which I decided to close and streamline with Plum and Peach (my eStore, which I closed in 2006) after moving over to a Content Management System.
8. The latest change (May 2007) is to change the look of the site to make it more modern, clean and streamlined. Certain content, which I think is not necessary, has also been removed, e.g. Devotion and Ecards.
9. 2008, I changed webhost and as expected, encountered some teething problems. I also set up a new store on this site which is an Amazon aStore.
10. In 2009, my web developer friend went home to the Lord. Without him around, just an email away, I felt completely helpless at maintaining the site. I also went through a long period of contemplation, undecided whether this site should go on or not; and if it does, what direction it should take and whether I have any more things to share that others might benefit from. Through the years, my parenting style has also evolved and some of the articles written in the earlier years also do not quite reflect my current sentiments.
11. 2010 – after a long hiatus, I finally made my way back to this site, gave up my intention to change platform (too tedious, too expensive), and made some changes to the site myself, without the assistance of my much-missed friend.
12. September 2011 – I finally took the plunge and changed the site from what my late friend did for me – using a Content Management System called Mambo – to a blog platform, ie. WordPress. The migration took longer than the actual turning-off-turning-on operation because the database of Mambo is not compatible with that of WordPress. When the day came when I finally picked up the courage to do it, the process was surprisingly easy and smooth and within one night, the new site was up and running.
13. May 2014 – I am reviewing this page and think that it is time for a short update. Since I changed to WordPress, I have meddled around with the layout and themes a few times. In the process, I lost all the images of the older articles and worse, I did not have a copy backed up anywhere. 🙁 I may have some of them in my photo archives but it is an extremely tedious process to go through years of photos to find them. Hence, I decided to give up trying to recover them.
14. Dec 2017 – Once again, I changed the look of the site to update the look and to reflect a change in the direction the site is going to take now that I have moved on in the education part of the parenting phase.