Back a long, long, long, time ago, (maybe 1996?) when I was in 5th grade maybe, I went to Best Buy with my Mom. We were just browsing the computer games when a game caught our eye - it was called Catz - your Computer Petz Palz! We thought it looked fun, so my Mom decided to buy it. We got home and installed it, and I remember being so amazed! The Catz actually looked and sounded real, and it would play on our desktop. We could even adopt different kinds! It was alot of fun, but there was only so depth to it. I remember awhile later, maybe another year (1997?), and I was at the store again. And it was there that I discovered CatzII, with even more realistic-looking catz, more breedz, more toyz, and if you bought DogzII then your petz could play together! I was in love. I begged my parents to buy the Catz game, and I think a couple months later I recieved it as a Christmas gift. I was elated! I imported a couple of my favorites from Catz1 (I think one was named J.B., a calico kitty I still have) and couldn't get enough of that game. One day on the loading screen there was a tip that said to check out petz.com for more toys and breeds for the game. I immediately went there, and was astounded at what I found. Not only were there tons of additional downloads for my game, such as the alleycat breed and the maine coon (I think?), but there was a whole community full of people who loved the petz game too! I visited the forums there, and was taken aback by the sheer numbers I saw on that board. I visited the adoption centre, where people could upload their petz and other people could download them. I looked at the fans links on the homepage, and realized that this was a whole entire world I'd never even dreamed of. I dived right in, downloading petz galore, new toys, hexed breeds, litters (not real litters, of course - these petz couldn't breed) - everything and anything I could get my hands on. I slowly learned about the petz shows and showing system, and slowly started learning about this whole amazing world. Well, it wasn't long before I started envying all those wonderful petz sites, and started dreaming of having my own site. In the summer of 1998, I stumbled upon a webhost called The Express Page, and after a long discussion with my parents (they were always very worried about internet safety and remaining annoymous on the net - it was those early days, ya know) I was allowed to create a simple, tiny page on The Express Page. I used their easy page builder, with had preset options and such and called my website Sunset Kennelz. My best friend at the time, Liz, also created a her own page on Expage, as well - hers was called Lizzy's Place. Well, as the months went by, I learned all the simple things I could do with my page, and went on to make other pages such as adoptions, my petz, and a litterz section (expage did not allow pictures to be uploaded, so there was only clipart graphics!). Soon, I got tired of not having pictures of petz on my site, so I went in search of other site hosts. I tried Geocities, AOL, Homestead, Angelcities, Xoom, and lastly, Angelfire. I didn't know squat about html at first, and so, my site on Angelfire first contained a white background, with text and a broken image which was suppossed to be my catz, Truth. I found a few html help sites, and very, very slowly, taught myself HTML. Soon there was alot of hype going on about Petz3 - everyone was so excited. I find out the release date, and called my local Best Buy every single day (and if you've ever called them you'd know you have to wait about 30 minutes to finally talk to someone!). Finally after several weeks of this, my perserverance was rewarded. One day I called, and they had Catz3! I was so excited, I begged my parents to drive me up there and buy it. It turned out to be everything I thought it would be - and more. It was awesome! My friend Liz bought Dogz3, and we traded games so we each could combine and have Petz. So of course, I had to change the Sunset Kennelz site name to Sunset Kennelz3, and Liz changed her site to Photographic Kennelz. About a year later, my site contained frames, along with a number of new pages, and hexed litterz. also- the name was now Sunset Kennelz3/4, to include the new Petz4 game. Sunset Kennelz3/4 was done in blue paws, and the christmas version included cool, falling snowflakes down the home page. Well, that summer things changed. I decided my site needed something more. It was such an average petz site that it would get lost in the huge pool of the PC. So, I remodeled and changed the name to Pawz-2-Pawz. The new remodel looked great (because I had at that time, just recently discovered a great program called paint shop pro)- it was very summery, done in yellow and orange. Around october, I remodeled- and version 2.0 of p2p was created- done in black and white, with a picture of a cat across the bottom frame. And around january, i believe, i remodeled a third time- this time the theme was Crew, a sport I had been involved in the entire school year. It featured a picture of my boat at a race, just crossing the finishing line at a regatta in North Carolina (and yup, we won! *g*), and the rest of the site had a picture of water as a background. That was the last version of P2P. So, roughly about a year after P2P was created, I decided that the site needed more. It needed more originality and it needed to be able to stand out from the crowd. I knew, looking at all the other great petz sites, that my site needed something more than a new remodel, something more than a new face - it needed a new personality. I thought for days trying to come up with the perfect name, something that was never done before, something funny, something unique, something that still related to the petz game in some way. And eventually, one day, that little lightbulb above my head lit up in all its glory. I had thought of the perfect name - 3 Blond Mice. The year was 2001, and I immediately began plans for the first layout of 3BlondMice. I needed color, I needed contrast, I needed to make a statement. I chose black and yellow, and the end result was quite eye-popping. After a month or so, I realized that even that, was not enough. 3BlondMice needed to make an even bigger statement to take it's place in the PC. But how to do that? A new layout, of course - because I already had plenty of unique content. I needed a layout that made people think "wow". Something that would stick in their minds. I found an amazing photograph, it was a close up of a motorcycle wheel as it sped down the center line of a highway, with a gorgeous blue sky and beautiful desert all around. I made my first popup website, I made a layout out of that photo, and made a logo for 3BlondMice. It was similar to a HarleyDavidson logo, and really made an impact. People started really recognizing 3BM, and more more frequently 3BM was the "spotlight site" on various other big popular petz sites. I had gotten my foot in the door and made an entrance, but now I needed to back it up. I devoted endless amounts of time to making new content, hexing, graphics, everything I could think of. I had an endless flow of ideas for 3BM's content, I've always been good at that. That was no problem. But I decided that I wanted to make 3BM look just as impressive as it's content was. I wanted 3BM's layout to be cool, hip. I wanted 3BM to be edgy, I wanted it to be unique, I wanted it to reflect me and how I was feeling at any given moment. So, I erased the boundaries - I pushed my layouts to the extreme, and pushed my coding abilities, as well. I used DHTML for a chromeless window in v5, as well as the navigation and scrollbar (you would just hold your mouse over the arrows and it would automatically scroll for you). I made a layout in which the content was contained inside of a giant star. Later, I made a layout out of a digital alarm clock. Another favorite was one with a ripped man on it. I always pushed the limits, pushed to eliminate the boundaries between what I could and couldn't do with my creativity and imagination. Looking back at those layouts, I think I was probably pretty successful. I kept updating 3BM all through high school, and all the graphics and webdesigning made an impact on me. I had known since the early days of Sunset Kennelz3, what I wanted to do for a living - when I grew up. Graphic Design or WebDesign. So after graduating high school, petz ended up ultimately influencing my decision to attend a college that offered Graphic Design as a Major/Degree. I moved away to school, from Florida to Oklahoma. 3BM was currently on v15, and I updated every now and then, but college life is very different, and I found I'd rather spend my time with my new boyfriend (we met the first night at college) and out at parties. 3BM had been hosted by one of my sister sites, Sara @ Mist, and while I disappeared from the PC for awhile, apparently so did she. After awhile I remembered 3BM again, but when I went to where it used to be it was gone, and so was Sara @ Mist. So then I just forgot about it, until a couple years later. My senior year of college, I had just bought my own domain name for my personal website, as well as my graphic design portfolio. I bought the domain because I knew that once I gradauted, an online portfolio would be a great way to show my work to possible employers. So I forked over the money, and then realized that I had extra space on my domain. So - why not? I had all the current files on my computer, so I just uploaded them, still on v15 (haha), and then 3BM was back. It wasn't back for too long, though. After Winter Break was over, my life was consumer, once again, with school, rowing, my fiance' (remember the boyfriend I met the first day of college?), and preparing for the wedding, graduation, and moving all across the country - which we had no idea where we were moving to, because he still hadn't gotten his acceptance letters to any of his med school applications. It was a stressful, busy time (not to mention all the bridal showers that were thrown for me!). I was very busy with all that, and so while 3BM was back, I, myself, was a little preoccupied with getting married and moving and such, to really do much updating and what-not. But once that was over with, I had a job, and we finished moving out of my husband's basement (haha!), realized that we could afford to have internet in our new place, I found that I had time again, to do what I love doing - running and maintaining 3BlondMice. I'm put hours of time, work, sweat and tears into 3BM, and 3BM has taught me alot. So 3BlondMice has come along way, but it is here now, and I plan on always keeping it here. If there ever comes a time when I fall out of love with petz and don't care to maintain it, it will remain here - possibly as a resource for anyone who cares to learn some random things. 3BM's doors will, never again, close.
lol now that I've basically just given you the *boring* history of my petz sites, here's some pics of the layouts that i've been able to keep pictures of. Pics of versions 2+3 were deleted when my computer's hard drive was wiped out.
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