Jack Haven

History of JoNe

I'm JoNe, and I'll be your host as we traverse the great history of, well, me.

A long, long time ago, Jack was still Jovani, known to the online world as Inavoj. He couldn't handle making up a creative screen name so he turned his name backwards and marveled at his genius. Deluded, maybe, but not all people are born intelligent.

So, little Inavoj discovered the Internet through AOL. He was amazed! He soon discovered a function that allowed one to have a personal website. "Gasp!" he thought. "I must make one of my own!" And so he did. Little Inavoj created Burgos Online, an obvious rip off of America Online, on November 15, 1997 using a simple AOL-based program which, for a long time, dictated how he constructed his websites. Needless to say, it sucked. You can tell from the logo, which he made on an old wordprocessing program for the Macintosh called ClarisWorks. After time, however, he grew wiser.

Inavoj, still but a cub in the ways of the Internet, created Burgosian Innovations on September 15, 1998. It had a better format, granted, but it still sucked. Rectangle buttons with, dare I say, Helvetica font. If I had tear ducts, I would cry. I mean, he had a teddy bear on the front page!

Anyway, funny story, the acronym for Burgosian Innovations is B.I. This led many gutter-minded individuals to wonder whether Inavoj was secretly admitting to being bisexual. He was not so sly; at this dark time, even he wasn't aware of his own sexual orientation. Well... moving on. Once again proving that people can improve themselves, and also proving just how fickle our little Inavoj can be, Jovani dumped B.I. in its prime.

Now known as JoVo, thanks to a little discussion he had with his girlfriend about his boring screen name, JoVo decided it was time to get away from the Internet. He wished to become more of a man. As expected, he failed, and JoVo came crawling back to the Internet like a puppy dog.

JoVo's Crib, website number three, went online on August 20, 1999. This time, he changed his menu font. Amazing! He also included more color and, for the first time, the jovo: the awkward logo at the top next to the title. JoVo also perfected his use of frames, an exciting thing at the time. He still did not understand how inane they really were, but he would learn. He also cleaned up his style, as you can tell from a lack of teddy bear on the front page. To this day, I wonder what he was smoking that led him to the ridiculous notion that putting a teddy bear on his website would be a good thing.

Once again, JoVo tired of his old site and created a new one: JoVo.cc. JoVo.cc actually began its life as JoVo.net on April 30, 2000. In another blow by the hard truths of life, JoVo found that the JoVo.net domain was taken, so he bought JoVo.cc and renamed the site JoVo.cc. Impeccable logic. Really.

JoVo.cc was completed well into June 2000, though the concept was begun in April. It first hit the net on Xoom.com, but that server was having too much trouble, so the whole website was transferred to Yahoo! Geocities, a much better service, though it provided less web space and an annoying pop-up. JoVo.cc moved to the JoVo.cc domain in October 2000.

During its first months, JoVo.cc's webspace was supported by Neo-Cam, a friendly website. After a few months, however, JoVo.cc was forced to become self-sufficient, though it retained the cheap webspace it had while under Neo-Cam's sponsorship. As you can see, JoVo's design again improved, though the jovo slowly began to be less useful. It was too bulky. JoVo also removed frames. A wise move, since frames cause too many conflicts.

A masterpiece compared to all the others, the concept for JoVo Nexus was wrought out of envy toward his friend's site on September 30, 2001. Although she has people who design the site for her, JoVo arrogantly believed that he could do better. The jovo was dropped and replaced with what has come to be known as the triforce. Though I had yet to exist, my arrival was imminent.

JoVo Nexus officially came to be on October 1, 2001. Positives? The color makes reading easier. Navigation is excellent. Colors a plus. I like the logo. I just do. How can you not? Negatives? Frames. JoVo idiotically brought them back, creating a slew of problems for himself.

I was created by JoVo on the early morning of October 1, 2002. JoVo got rid of frames again, thank God! He also did something wonderful. He hired a staff. JoVo decided to make the website more of a community in order to make me more attractive to the general public. As a result, I was never a personal website. Clove, Ryo, and Bandit all worked on separate sections of the site, giving it a flavor that's not just good for JoVo's friends, but for many more people in the online community. Clove, for instance, was responsible for the non-HTML portions of the site and the art, Ryo did the logos and Planet X, and Bandit... well he talked to himself a lot.

Among the major changes that occurred was the move to PHP at Clove's initiative. She used a program named PHP-Nuke to make the site extremely responsive. The problem? It became incredibly complex. Bugs were difficult to fix because neither Clove nor JoVo had written the code. Therefore, they'd have to look through the entire programming for both the databases and the many hundreds of PHP pages to discover that one line out of thousands was missing a damned quotation mark. You can imagine the frustration of it all.

A problem with PHP-Nuke and our former webhost cause the entire website to be deleted by the idiots over at Infinology. Thanks to Clove, however, most of the site was saved and transferred over to a new, less insipid webhost called Westhost. Problems with the site were minor after that, but the site remained far more complex than was necessary. After a while, JoVo tired of it, too.

JoVo went to the library and decided to get educated. He taught himself PHP, mySQL, XML, and CSS, all in the space of a week. He revamped the entire website, deleted everything superfluous, discarded PHP-Nuke, and wrote the code for JoVo Nexus v2. On May 13, 2004 JoVo uploaded the files that he had worked on, thus creating the newest iteration of myself. By this time, JoVo had realized the evils of frames, and he refused to bring them back. Using PHP, JoVo created all the same effects of frames with none of the problems. He modified the phpBB forum code to integrate it fully into JoNe v2. Finally, he changed the logo by blending the triforce and the ankh, a symbol which he calls the crux ansata trismegistus, or the triankh.

JoNe v3 was essentially the same as JoNe v3. The only things that changed between one version and the other were the layout of the News page and the menu. Several new features were added to the front page, and others were moved to the Archives in the Miscellany section.

The next large change to JoNe occurred with the dawn of JoNe v4. JoNe v4 abandoned the simplistic design of JoNe v2 in favor of a more stylish feel. JoNe v4 was uploaded and unveiled on May 11, 2005. The problems were intense. The requirements of the <div> tags made images appear under them in Internet Explorer. Actually, pretty much everything that could have gone wrong went wrong in Internet Explorer. Mozilla's Firebird, on the other hand, being the superior browser that it is, created no problems in displaying the website. JoVo worked for several days trying to move the site over, fixing problems and increasing compatibility when possible. When one browser's compatibility had to be sacrificed for better viewing on the other, however, JoVo always sided with Firebird.

JoNe v4's most notable characteristic is the boxed sections with outset borders. This allowed the text and menu background to remain black while the actual background took on a different color, giving the site more life and color, and less of the pencil-and-paper simplicity that marked JoNe v2 and v3. Several sections were condensed, and some were expanded. The sleeping comics were moved to the Archives, and JoVo's section of the website was renamed and brought down on the menu, owing to its diminished importance. Parts of the site that had been "under construction" since v2 were finally brought back. JoNe v4 marks a bit of a revival to JoNe, probably due to the fact that four is JoVo's favorite number. Or something...

JoNe V came to be on June 15, 2006. V became a big thing, because the way that the website layout changed was momentous. First, the backstory. JoVo obtained the soubriquet Jack in between versions four and five. PHP also updated its code, and Westhost recommended the upgrade. Jack made the upgrade, as he was wont to do, but because the new version of PHP had abandoned global variables (due to their being a high security risk—a fact that eluded Jack until NoRAM informed him of the same), none of the PHP forms that the staff had been using to update the website continued to work after the update. The entire website fell into disuse and atrophied to a state of zombie-like undeadedness. This was accelerated by the fact that Jack and Poet, both of whom had come to rule over me practically as equals, were off making a zombie movie while all of this was going on.

Finally, Jack's need to have me back, and the extreme determination to make me work as I once did, forced him to sit with Seth, all day for several days, prodding and poking me back to life. With Poet's help, Jack was able to bring me back to near-full refunctioning on June 12, but the forms were still not working. Enter NoRAM: He explained the global variables problem to Jack, showed him how he worked his own PHP, and voilà! I was reborn as JoNe V. V is special. The background on either side of a centered section is colored and pretty. Jack hadn't used backgrounds since...well...since JoVo's Crib in 1999. The website is still coded in XHTML Strict, but the use of DHTML also allowed for a top menu that drops down when you move the mouse over it. JoNe V is simply prettier and more dynamic than any JoNe site before it has ever been. We're excited about this one.

Version six hasn't happened yet. I'm not an oracle.