shintara . net - keepin` it real!

shintara.net is a place that exists for me to air however I am feeling, a place where I have no boundaries in which I can say whatever I want, when I want and am not governed by any person, organisation or legislation - shintara.net is about me being me.

Of course I keep what I say within reason of political correctness, but there have been times where I have let go...

'well in my books Telstra SUCK! I am sick of money hungry teleco giants getting hits from my site (thats if anyone bothers clinking on there, or even reading this!), I may aswell link to http://indiaimage.nic.in/ for some telstra support/software development. I wonder if they "make life easier" in India?'

These times are few and far between and my goal is not to offend any person and/or organisation. The above excerpt was when the Australian Teleco giant Telstra decided to outsource thier work to contractors in India, which to me ridiculed the Australian ethos of trying to keep everything 'Aussie'.

The front (home) page on shintara.net represents the place where I air my feelings. Topics covered include the wage fiasco radiographers are facing, road rage, photography, camping, questioning my intelligence, I hate MS windows, myself the UNIX geek and four wheel driving. But shintara.net isnt just about those things, I am very passionate about photography and the UNIX operating system in which I publish my articles on here. My online portfolio/resume resides on here aswell. I like to consider shintara.net as a place on the web in which you can get lost reading articles, learning things, viewing photos or just listening to me rant and rave.

How it began
The beginings of shintara date back to late 1997 and early 1998 when I first dabbled in websites. My first website's URL was http://geocities.com/d_slapper/ and was known as kokanes site where you could download a small script that would enhance the mIRC chat program.

After becoming bored and sick of the geocities URL I decided to shift over to tripod where the URL changed significantly, the name I wanted wasnt available and after wasting a few hours thinking of a catchy word I came up with shintara.

Shintara: your first name of shintara has given you a very friendly, likeable nature, and you could excel in artistic, dramatic, and musical expression. With this name, you desire the finer things in life, but you do not always have the resolve and vitality to put forth the effort necessary to fulfil your desires. Taken from http://www.kabalarians.com/female/shintara.htm.

That was it, http://shintara.tripod.com/ it rolled off the tongue easily and most importantly I was happy with it. Funnily enough the description of shintara reminds me of me, its funny how these things turn around and bite you in the face.

For the next few years shintara went about its daily business as usual, it provided a great place for people to download the script that I wrote and regularly updated. The overall look of the website changed dramatically as I improved my coding and design skills. It went from a relatively easy to make site designed using Netscapes Composer to complex designs using tables and CSS that were done using a text editor.

January 2000
This was one of the major turning points in shintara, the design of the site had progressed quite well and I had started doing what is known as blogging, which is updating a column regularly with daily events/happenings. What was so special about January 2000 - well it became a turning point in shintara's popularity, I had been writing these mIRC scripts for a few years and in January I released what was to be the last ever script I wrote and the most famous by far. What was known as silver edition was downloaded 2000 odd times in the first week of release and along with those downloads people returned to shintara to read what I had to say.

November 2001
After tripod decided to increase the advertisements on thier free hosting and thier hosting reliability left me with a dirty taste in my mouth I decided it was time to purchase my own space on the web, shintara.net was born. Hosting was done through the quite reliable and very affordable 2m Host which has served its purpose quite well.

Shintara.net uses a php/mysql backend (which at present is getting a work over for further functionality). At present shintara will be expanding to a new URL, http://shintara.org/ which will host my photographic work. Shintara.org will be hosted on a PC at home and will be (a world first for me) hosted on the Windows platform.
Shintara is constantly moving forward and shintara.org is leading into a new era...

Information that may interest you
Shintara.net's content both visually and written is copyright 1997-2006 and has rights reserved under guidance of the Creative Commons license. Contact me for more information.