Homepage history
ephralon.de exists at this url since December 30th 1999.
Before this, it was hosted at Fortunecity in the Rivendell quarter. Its name was eph's Toyzone and eph's Battlezone back then, which changed to eph's KiSSing Battlezone after a while. At that time it was bilingual and featured mostly tabletops and KiSS dolls. This changed over the next years to an almost all English webpage. For a long time there were many reviews of videogames, roleplaying games, miniature games and many other things, a few of which still await being updated and republished. Sister sides were brassfortress.de (artwork) and kyuden-kawaii.de (games). Both have been included in ephralon.de by now. The url pika-pika.de has been abandoned.
Now it's eph's Den of Many Things, and I think this name fits best since over the years many areas of interest were added and a few also vanished. After many, many redesigns with varying technical backends, several splits into smaller websites about single topics and countless tries to juggle everything that mattered to me I now use Joomla, a content management system, to keep my stuff in check.
The website moved from host to host several times. It started out at Strato, then moved to Travar for a while. Afterwards I rented my first root server at Alturo until they closed down and I moved to a root server at Strato. Since early 2009 I have a dualcore root server at Norplex and I hope I can continue to stay here for another good while.
Why Ephralon and why Eph?
I wish I could say that Eph is a clever acronym for some wise phrase but actually it's a rather dumb story.
Ephralon is a character I invented when I was about nine years old. Almost ever since I'm able to write I wrote stories about Ephralon. So, what do you write with nine? Stories about sword wielding super heroines, of course. (Hey, I can't help it but I was a giant fan of He-man and She-ra, that's how I grew up with fantasy.) Until I was about 17 that was my favourite pastime. By that time my previous primary school Mary-Sue had developed into a truly independant character and we decided to get a divorce and send her and her giant universe into retirement.
That said, a long time ago it came to pass that I sat, late at night, in the computing centre of the university with a floppy disk (!) in hand and wanted to send my very first KiSS doll to Otakuworld. That was my first contact with the internet as an "author". First I gave my real name in the email but felt uncomfortable by that right after clicking "send". Who knows what kind of lunatics that might attract. The cool guys all have nicknames, right. So I needed one, and quick before my real name would go online after all. The only thing I could think of in this situation was Eph.
When it was time to find a name for my website there was a similar situation. All names I could think of were already taken (luckily, I've gotta say in retrospective! What wacky names I've thought of!), but my trusty Ephralon was still available.
Since almost nobody knows the "true" Ephralon anyway I've long given up my fruitless tries to change my nickname into something more reasonable. Since in these days and age I don't write stories about masked super heroines anymore though there is actually almost nothing to find about Ephralon around here. There's a few scattered pictures in the galleries and it even took prodding to make me get them from a drawer.
The only thing I can't stand is when someone calls me Ephralon, because I am not Ephralon and nobody would ever have dared to give Ephralon a nickname. ; )