The History of iSoaker.com .:
2002: Upgrade
Start: January 1, 2002
To greet 2002, iSoaker.com's upgrades which had begun over 2 months prior were pushed forward into reality. While general page layout remains consistent, the actual page coding has been altered to allow more flexibility on some pages. Layouts for certain menus have been streamlined for easier navigation. The WaterNet project was shut down and the section renamed SoakerNet. The key distinction is that SoakerNet is considered as a subdivision of Aquatica. As such, the iSoaker.com SoakerNet section is provided as an additional resource of Aquatica in order to further promote that online community. Meanwhile, more information is being learned about the various new 2002 soakers. Next phase which is currently being worked on is various information upgrades to the sections of iSoaker.com. The year is young... time to make the most of it!
Tech Stats: Total Site: (903) 12.2 Mb
Still Image Files: JPG (290) 4.35 Mb, GIF (40) 673kb, Flash (132) 3.89 Mb
New soaker season... new web technologies available.. new site launched. Unlike many previous updates, the level of the 2002 iSoaker.com update resulted in every page being altered, content being re-organized, reviews enhanced, and more. Many new sections and pages were added for the update. As well, file names were standardized, images were fixed, overall styling adjusted, and a new feel given to the site. Many of the existing pages were edited and enhanced while maintaining the bulk of the information previously available on the site, but presenting it in a cleaner format. This change, however, represents a major transition point as other new web-technologies will be used in iSoaker.com in the future. While this upgrade represents a major change to the iSoaker.com site, it does only hint at things still to come. "This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end. This is the end of the beginning."
New soaker season... New surprises! While unannounced, the last upgrade was only a tentative fix until a more complete change could be completed. While some would argue that the site style changes too much, fact is each change brings the site one step closer to how I want the site to behave. Current change brings a lot more navigation elements and information into the main page instead of having to load new pages. Future versions of the site will see more information being brought into the main navigation as opposed to required full-page refreshes, etc. This will hopefully make navigation more pleasant as well as lowering traffic bandwidth. Over the course of the summer, many changes to iSoaker.com are planned and the site will be evolving below the HTML surface. Updates will simply be launched (as this one was) without too much prior hype since I'm not sure how long some changes will take. As well, many changes will not even be announced (especially if they are back-end changes), only to be stumbled across when a visitor accesses the new feature. The main goal for iSoaker.com 2002 is to go from being a static site to being a more dynamic one. Of course, in the end, it's still about water blasters and water warfare so the information pool will also continue to be upgraded. Soak on! :: Leave NO one dry! :: iSoaker.com ::
The end of another soaker season draws nearer, but instead of going into hibernation, iSoaker.com took a late-summer siesta to launch a overhauled site in September. The main Splash Flash area was expanded. As well, more pages are brought into the main page as opposed to having the visitor load up new pages. The end result it a smoother/cleaner browsing experience. However, all review pages retain their own HTML page since the review Flash movies are more processor intensive. One of the major changes of how information is brought into the Flash movies is through load-on-demand text boxes which bring text into a pre-defined text area in a Flash movie on demand. This, too, makes for a better browsing experience while, at the same time, lessening the amount of bandwidth used. To compliment the site upgrade, a new, slick Intro movie was created. In addition, the upgraded site was built on a new server which provides more capabilities that will be tapped into in the future. As the cherry on the cake for the site upgrade, iSoaker.com received a revised version of the History of the Super Soaker(R) page, altered and improved by Dr. Lonnie Johnson, himself, Inventor of the Super Soaker(R)! It's always nice when we realize that even the inventor of the Super Soaker has taken time not just to notice, but also to contribute to the development of iSoaker.com! In addition to the revamped History, he also provided iSoaker.com with images of the original prototype water blaster that the Super Soaker(R) was based on. Thank you, Lonnie!
Fall: the season of change. A multitude of changes have occurred within the past couple of months in the online water warfare world. For iSoaker.com, it has been a time of refocussing on the essentials and preparation for new things to come. Navigation and information retreival and display have been cleaned up and simplified. In many cases, choosing a section in the main menu loads up the text directly into the active movie, allowing visitors to scan through articles more quickly without the constant need of reloading other common page elements. As well, a new Flash game has been released, known as Target Challenge. This is the second Flash-based soaker game available on iSoaker.com, building on the foundation of the Soaker Duels game.
Spring: the season for rebirth and rejuvenation. As a step in a rather different direction than before, the changes made on iSoaker.com make the site less dependent on Flash with simplified Flash menus and more text links. The Intro (which some loved while others found annoying) has been removed, leaving only a background loading Splash movie in the main page. The Splash movie on the main page now occupies less real-estate with three text boxes being added beneath to point visitors to the site highlights or give them the latest news or featured links.
Summer time - the height of the soaker season. The summer 2003 iSoaker.com upgrade has just begun, yet it is proving to be the most ambitious upgrade attempted. Unlike previous upgrades that involved mostly file re-organization coupled with some design-element changes, the current upgrade is moving iSoaker.com from the static world of HTML to the dynamic world of ColdFusion. For this change to occur well, a fundamental change is occuring in how iSoaker.com is organized. Much more thought of pre-building design is occuring with each step of the new upgrade. The change to iSoaker.com is far from over. However, the changes that have occurred thusfar warranted an addition to the iSoaker.com History page. For security reasons, tallies of each file type will no longer be made available.
A mid-summer's night's dream... and the vision for the new iSoaker.com layout was born. While still in the process of learning more about ColdFusion pages, it was decided that the site could use a little bit of a clean-up and reorganization in some sections. While the main page's appearance shows a major tidying-up of the layout, inner sections have also been re-organized to some degree in hoped to make finding various sub-sections within iSoaker.com more intuitive. In the coming months, I hope to continue simplifying finding things on the site as well as continuing to provide new content and information as well as eventually making the site more interactive for the visitor.
Mid-autumn finds an overall upgrade of site styling and overall organization. On the backside, iSoaker.com is becoming a more active site, implementing active pages throughout fhe site while leaving parts open for future expansion. Site styling, fonts, colouring, etc. has been made more unified throughout the site thanks to greater usage of cascading style sheets. In addition, our new access to higher quality images will mean better images and graphics coming soon. Finally, we will be encouraging the growth and development of the iSoaker Registry in order to help bridge the distances and unite water warriors worldwide with their fellow enthusiasts. 
Goodbye to table-based layouts and greetings to CSS! The change from table-formats to CSS-based formatting allows iSoaker.com to now go full screen, but also offers the flexibility of redefining formatting on the fly. While pages can now load to make use of the browser window's realestate, in event that one wants to print a page, simply clicking on the "Click for Printable Version" link on the top of most pages will reformat a given page to a more printer-friendly version.
