This page contains information about the webmistress, and the website. Please contact me if you can think of anything else that should also be included.
The Webmistress
Amy was born on August 20th 1983, at Lake Merritt Hospital in Oakland, CA. The adventurous sort as a child, she takes much pride in her tumble down a flight of cement stairs which she stood up and walked away from at the age of two or three. She also had to get stitches due to a disagreement she got into with a metal bed frame just before her third birthday, and she was reported to have tried to jump out the window somewhere in these tender years... she probably wanted to fly.
Since then, she's cut back on the death defying stunts, but she's still having a hard time being normal. She recently found a new job after having been unemployed for about a year. She had been a Radio Shack Sales Associate for five and three-quarters years, and initially took time to sort her head out. Her new job (four months old as of writing) has a much better work environment, but still has some of the standard pitfalls of a retail job, but she's doing much better with it than she'd done at Radio Shack. She's enjoying a resurrection of her creativity, finding drawing and writing to be not as difficult as they'd become during the last few years at Radio Shack. If she can find someone who'll pay her to write fiction, throw pottery or build websites, she'd be pretty happy.
She's been using Linux as her primary OS since May 3rd, 2004. Technically her first distribution of Linux was Red Hat, but that was a dual boot system where she hardly ever booted into the Linux partition. Her first full time distribution was Mandrake, but when her friend who was originally her primary tech support started getting distant, and Mandrake officially changed its name to Mandriva, she started looking for a new distribution to try. When two of her friends, who don't happen to agree on very much, both recommended Ubuntu she decided to check it out. She actually ended up installing Kubuntu because she liked KDE based upon her time using it with Mandrake. Currently she has Kubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn installed.
She mostly listens to Classic Rock, but her music palette has been expanding to include some newer and currently preforming artists. Her music taste is probably best summed up on her last.fm profile, diziara. She doesn't watch much TV, but she's a big fan of shows like Farscape, Firefly, Invader Zim, Kim Possible, and Veronica Mars. Her list of movies she enjoys is a bit longer and best viewed on her DVD Aficionado page. She favors Science Fiction and Fantasy when reading, but she certainly doesn't limit herself to just that. You can see what books she has read, and which ones she'd like to read, on her GoodReads bookshelves.
If you're interested, you can take a look at her current resume. Her phone number and address are not listed for internet safety, but are available upon request.
The Website
Amy has had SaturnGirl.net since December 31st 2000, and DeathKitten.net since May 23rd 2004. Currently SaturnGirl.net mirrors DeathKitten.net, and there are various subdomains on each domain for different projects. Both SaturnGirl.net and DeathKitten.net are registered at Go Daddy, and the current hosting is through DreamHost (the link is a referral that will help pay for the hosting of these domains, so please use it if you're interested in service with Dreamhost).
When starting out in Geocities, Amy used their "easy" editors, but it didn't take her long to figure out enough to use a text based editor instead. She has gone through a few different editors over the years, ranging from text pad on Windows to Emacs on linux. Currently she's giving Quanta a go, and happy to find it highlights HTML tags in php files, which is something Emacs failed to do. The site is uploaded using FireFTP, a Firefox extension. Most graphic editing is done using GIMP.
Click on any of the thumbnails to view a graphic of the whole style.
This site started out on Geocities, after a friend helped Amy set up an account and moved her away from the AOL free space she'd started out on. Its original layout was a mess of graphics and stuff that Amy thought was cool, and it mutated from one thing to another, eventually coming to a halt with a nebula background, planetary buttons and other space related stuff. The content mutated along with the layout, including stuff like writing samples, art work, and weird little "cyber pets" adopted around the web, as well as countless links to weird things and friends' sites.
Then Amy learned how to make frames, and she'd taken this really cool picture of some California Poppies growing on the side of a rock face. This inspired her to make what she consider her first real layout. She cleaned up her content, and divided things up into categories, then moved over to crosswinds. Eventually she started working at Radio Shack, and ended up registering her first domain. This layout was the first layout for Saturn Girl.net.
Due to some issues with the host, Amy ended up with banners she had no control over messing up the frame system on the site, so she created the second layout. This one used tables and was pretty simple, since it mostly consisted of blue flames running down the side of each page. She cleaned up the content much more when she put up this layout, removing a lot of the junk she had left over from her participation in The Site Fights.
The third layout was Amy's responce to a long length of time knowing that she wanted to redo the site again, but having no luck making anything she was happy with. She was just playing around one day, then decided this would work. Along with this redesign, she cleaned out everything but some basic info about herself, her writing, message board, and links.
The fourth layout was inspired by Amy's devil horn sweatshirt. She was taking a "dhtml class" (both terms used loosely here), and the teacher insisted the class put together good layouts for their project sites. This one came together in a basic form at that point. Amy was told by a couple friends that she should use the style on her domain because it was "so cute!" (specifically Julie said that). She kinda shrugged it off at the time. Later she came back to it, and decide to play with it as she learned CSS. It was cleaned up using a linked style sheet, and *poof* there it was!
The fifth layout resulted because Amy wanted to have a simple layout that people could pick what colors they wanted to view the site with. She also wanted to get away from frames of any sort because they make navigation and bookmarking more problematic. She originally started using frames because she liked having to only edit one file for the menus, instead of editing a copy of the menu on each page of the site, likewise for the header and footer of the page. Ruling frames out as a reasonable option, she decided to learn how to do the same function with php. While she knows she still has a whole lot more left to learn about php, she likes that she can do this much.
The current style is an update to the php used to pull the site together, as well as a chance to experiment more with the style of the site. This time the skins are going to be different in more ways than just color and Amy set up the skin switcher so it's accessable from any page of the site for all users, instead of making IE users click a link and visit a page dedicated to the style sheets.