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Broken Fall—The Name

As I was working on my I Caught Fire fanlisting, I thought of the name “Broken String” as an idea for the name of a fanlisting collective. After that I realized that Broken String might be a good name to replace Woolisauce, and I nearly registered brokenstring.org.

However, the next day I realized that the initials of a site called Broken String would be BS, which I didn’t want. Thus, I brainstormed a list of seventeen related potential site names. In the end, I chose Broken Fall over my second choice, which was Ashen Ruby.

Although the individual words that make up my site’s name have negative connotations, the name as a whole contains a positive one. To break a fall is to stop it or lessen its impact. Although not why I picked the name, Broken Fall does have a nice meaning to it in that my website serves as an excellent distraction to me, and breaks my “fall” in a way.

My Webdesign Story

Like many others, I got my start on Neopets.com. I joined Neopets after my last day of eighth grade (2006), after I heard a couple of girls talking about it at school that day. At that time, I thought that when people coded, they coded each individual pixel of their graphics, so I thought web designers were geniuses, and I told people so when they asked how it was done.

Not long after I joined Neopets, I discovered their HTML tutorial. I read through the whole thing while taking copious notes, which I only recently got rid of. After reading that, I used extremely basic HTML to do things such as edit my userlookup and start a small Neopets Guild. At this point, I was thirteen.

A while after when I was in ninth grade (probably 2006, maybe 2007), I learned to position existing divs and change the text properties in them, though I still didn’t really know how to create my own. I began making Neopets userlookups in Microsoft Paint, and later in a trial version of Paint Shop Pro. I owned a website called Smile-Tastic Graphix hosted on Geocities with my neofriends Shannon and Rae, and I posted the graphics I made at this time there.

Sometime after that, probably in 2007, my friend on Neopets who goes by the name of Sharpie helped me fill in the gaps in my knowledge of CSS by showing me the code of one of his userlookups and letting me ask questions. I found the code easy enough to understand and picked up on it pretty quickly.

After “completing my knowledge” of CSS sufficiently, I opened a website called Lavender Twist, hosted at Freewebs.com. There I posted some Neopets resources such as userlookups and one-column petpage layouts. By this time, I had also gotten Photoshop CS3 and had greatly improved my graphics-making skills. This was in 2007, and I was fourteen.

In December 2007 I stopped updating Lavender Twist and abruptly disappeared from the web design world. Well, this world anyways. I did create a website for my robotics team in January/February of 2008 during my time of disappearance.

When October 2008 rolled around, I decided to go back to owning a website, but since I had quit Neopets during my absence, it was time to change the focus of my site. I decided to make a pixel site, so I picked out the name Woolisauce, which I thought was a cute and fitting name for such a site. I shopped around for a satisfactory free host since I was sick of Freewebs’s ads, and after a while I came across 110mb.com, where I decided to get hosted. My website then was woolisauce.110mb.com, and it is now just a moved sign.

After a few months, I became friends with Georgina, and she offered to host me on a subdomain: woolisauce.heartdrops.org.

Eventually, I decided I wanted my own domain, so I looked into hosting plans and bought hosting from Parade Hosting. The hosting package I bought came with a free domain, so I moved to woolisauce.net.

I stayed at woolisauce.net for just under two months, and in that time I got extremely fed up with Parade Hosting’s server downtime and also became tired of the name Woolisauce. I learned about Cyber Global Hypernet and their free hosting plan from Liz, and since I had won three domain credits from the Namecheap Twitter trivia contest, I used one to register brokenfall.org, and moved here. I am currently extremely satisfied with my host and intend to stay with the same host and domain for a long time to come.