About PokeDS
The Staff Here
Shadow Files AKA Tiff
Hey there, I'm Tiff! I'm the webmistress in this little site here. Once upon a time back when I was the only person working on this site, I wrote an About Me Page. If you're really interested in reading about me for whatever reason you'd be interested in such a thing, feel free to go there, but otherwise, this little bit is a more concise summary.
- Tiff is from the Southeastern United States.
- She likes to draw, web design/program, and occassionally write.
- She will talk about herself in third person for the sake of this list, but otherwise, she will say...
- Randomness is a blessing!
Rehler
- Rehler is the mastermind behind Pokemon Mysteries.
- He was PokeDS's first ever actual staff member, other than Tiff.
- He is generally awesome.
Penguin AKA Taylor
- Taylor was originally the webmaster of a site called Vibrai.
- He is Tiff's good friend and a helping hand around PokeDS.
- He is also generally awesome.
Site History
There's a lot of wobble in the dates behind the Pokemon Desert Shadow. I'm not a strict recorder of dates although I can figure roughly when things happened.
The Pokemon Desert Shadow was the child of the first Pokemon site I ever made: The Pokemon Land Guild. This Geocities-hosted site was just as attrocious as you'd expect the site of a random 11 year old girl who learned HTML from Neopets to be. Bear in mind, this was March 2005!
Indeed, the site wasn't made for Pokemon so much as it was made for Neopets... well, it was kinda made for both; The Pokemon Land Guild, or PLG for short, was the "official" website of my Neopets Pokemon guild.
Soon, I started down the little road away from childhood and ended up losing interest in Neopets. I kept PLG alive as a site, but I converted it to a pure Pokemon fansite. I finally got around to learning a bit, and soon, I was creating actual layouts! Sloppy layouts, at least, but layouts nonetheless.
Hey, one day, I was like "I need a new name! This isn't a Neopets guild site anymore!" So, I talked with a friend on MSN about name possibilities and his screenname happened to start with "Desert", so I finally thought of Desert... then, I thought of my own screenname "Shadow Files", and I got "Desert Shadow."
I thought the name was pretty cool since a shadow would be a relaxing thing in the heat of a desert. So, I registered my first domain name: desertshadow.net. I felt so pro back then... I have a domain name! Wow!
So, for a while, this site was called "Shadow of the Desert." Why? I thought I earned cool points for putting the phrase "of the" randomly into names. During this time, many things happened. I worked hard on my site, got a decent host, and actually got a good few unique visitors a day.
But then, one day, my free host crashed, and my site went *poof*! I was disheartened, so I reuploaded my last backup which was short a good month's worth of almost daily updates. I remember being particularly discouraged that I had lost my 7-page indepth Pokemon Pinball guide I had written.
Shadow of the Desert was pretty much gone for good. I had updated the layout to be worse than the original one day when Penguin/Taylor bugged me to update my site. This was sometime in 2007.
I had made some random pieces of sites in between, but I had never dedicated myself to making a single site as amazing as possible like I had with Shadow of the Desert.
Until summer of 2009. When I made the Pokemon Desert Shadow. This new site was inspired by two things: learning PHP and looking at the rotting corpse of my old pokesite, thinking "If I made this again today.... it'd be 10 times better."
Thus, the Pokemon Desert Shadow claimed to be a new site on its own. Hey, it'd been long enough!
