FEShrine.NET-> Community -> History
Site History

The Fire Emblem Shrine has had a long history as a Fire Emblem fansite. Here you can find many details on how the FEShrine came about as well as other information about the site.

(Note: Some details may be vague or slightly inaccurate due to the difficulty in recollecting everything and elaborating on it.)

The Beginning

... I believe it was sometime in 2004 where the true beginning began. I, Fire Blazer, was a little kid interested in Fire Emblem. I saw it in stores and being the kid I was, was induced by the fantasy aspect into buying the game known as Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword.

Super Smash Bros. Melee expanded on my like for this, obviously, as sword-based characters were quite appealing to me. With this in mind I went online trying to find information and I found a site called Game Talk, a forum for people to chat without having to go through a registration process.

I met up with some people who would be some of my top friends and supporters, like Dark Lustre Magician, Simple Tactician, and Steroidboi, to name a few. I found Dark Twilkitri's incomplete translation patch of Fire Emblem 6 and went crazy about it, advertising it all over. In addition I wanted to make a website of my own where I could make reviews, walkthroughs, ratings, and do my own thing. I created a semi-successful site known as Ragnarok Fire, which is now no longer existent. It was a website made using http://www.freewebs.com and simple to boot but my obsessively noobish advertisment kept it going a little. I learned a lot about websites from this and it wasn't really smarts as much as taking a long time to learn-- all this was in 2004.

It was either late 2004 or early 2005 when I created Little Frenzy, a site where I hosted files for Ragnarok Fire. Soon after this I also made the Fire Emblem Shrine using another freewebs account, where the site was specifically about Fire Emblem. Just like now, back in the day the site had that same intense red color theme to it.

I didn't have much content on the Fire Emblem Shrine. I was more interested in making up names for sections, giving out "special info" that nobody else had, and making lots of updates. I still do that 'till today, don't I? As the Fire Emblem Shrine became more of my focus I lost sight of Ragnarok Fire. In 2006, I closed my first website and a lot of memories. I kind of wish I didn't, but back then closing Ragnarok Fire was a drama thing and I liked to make drama.

The Little Frenzy remained as a file host, but it moved from Ragnarok Fire to the Fire Emblem Shrine after RF closed. With this, the Fire Emblem Shrine became the main center attention, as well as all the affiliates, friends, forums, and memories along with it.

Freewebs Era

The original Fire Emblem Shrine was on the host Freewebs.com, which at the time of this writing, has changed to webs.com and developed very very far.

Originally, FES was just a freewebs site. No HTML coding, or CSS, or any fancy stuff. Just the good ol' web site builder, but only 1/2 as automated as now adays. Regardless, the original scheme was indeed red. I don't know why I chose red, but I did, and well, that's that.

Believe it or not, I didn't start with pages for all the games and hacking and stuff. Rather, I was more interested in writing Walkthroughs and Reviews for the games. So I just put up some sections for that and some images here and there and wala, a Fire Emblem site. Once in a while I'd make a small update or an excuse to update; for instance, "Sorry For the Lack of Updates, I'll be doing something soon", kind of like how I do now adays. I met up with a lot of people, and my online friends visited my site regardless of how much it sucked. I was very, very, VERY naive back then (sorry for not using the special character in the word 'naive') and I bugged my friends over and over to get them to help. Yeah, I feel bad now. Like, guilty. Still, good to know I had such loyal friends. ^_^

At some point around this time I met up with some of my favorite affiliates. Pooshies of Doom was a comedy site with random updated and random pages. It was really good and for whatever reason I had a lot of respect for it. It's where I got the quote "It's not laziness, it's a lack of motivation"-- maybe that's why. XD

Also around this time I got some random staff member that never did anything that I can't remember. I'm not sure if it was still this early in its stages, however my now good friend Seraphinox joined the crew. Seraphinox is a very loyal Irish (he can speak English, mind you) friend, walkthrough writer, and generally knowledgeable Fire Emblem player. I would have never gotten as far as I did without his guides to support because honestly, I only get so much done with my laziness.

Within time, I decided there there was going to be some changes... Kinda bored of the old layout and wanted a new spark. Having a website was always really cool for me, enjoyable, and I wanted to get another spark in that great enjoyability by making a "fresh start".

New Layout #1

HTML was for the most part a new concept to me. I looked around for some free templates until I found something interesting-- a greenish layout with navigation bars on both the right and left and space at the top for a banner. After quite a bit of unprofessional editing where I messed up some aspects and filled the page with web design errors, I started recreating pages.

The site was still located at http://www.freewebs.com/fireemblemshrine/ (believe it or not) but I started to use the "advanced" mode of freewebs instead of the typical site builder. Somewhere around sometime I also created other freewebs accounts where I uploaded files because I needed more space. One of them was http://www.freewebs.com/firemblemshrine/, the only difference from the actual site being that it only had ONE 'e' between 'fire' and 'emblem' instead of two. :P

With the new layout I also started to expand my website into many different sections. Random miscellaneous sections, lots of pages for different media and projects, and sections for each Fire Emblem that existed at the time. I even had somebody hired to find the latest Fire Emblem news/info and I made a page just for that :). This old site can still be viewed but you have to know the URL to one of the old pages because the main page has been deleted.

Another interesting note about this is that I made a section on hacking where I posted hacks, patches, documents, and other stuff. One of the key features about it was that it was the only hacking section ever and I made a form where people could ask for hacks to be made for them. In the end I only finished 1 hack that was requested and because I got about 100 requests for hacks I closed down the form to stop people from requesting. This is getting ahead of myself a little because when this version of FES was closed I was STILL getting requests, but I'm not exactly to the point where I closed FES in my story.

The Merge with Fire Emblem Universe

Fire Emblem Universe was a quickly growing and expanding forum. It had great members, pretty good administration, and one of my old best friends Arch ran the website. At some point we decided that my mainsite could merge with the forums and that's what we did. We were affiliates and the mainsite now had it's own forums--sorta--I just linked to Fire Emblem Universe and got it a bunch of hits and whatnot. In any case, it helped both of us out.

Arch at some point did have administrative privelages over the website. Yes, he could actually make his own updates to the site and whatnot. Here's where my memory gets cloudy; at some point the thing started to not work out, I didn't want my website to change its name to "Fire Emblem Universe" and Arch didn't want to change his site's name either. In addition, Arch wanted to make his own mainsite to go along with his forums. Our affiliation with each other was not very long lived but interesting and beneficial and a good experience. Once again, I think I'm getting ahead of myself...

Split Apart

Site updates past, pages fixed, content added, and serious business occurred. I don't really remember the details, as I think I said before, but our sites split apart, and it wasn't even very... 'professional'. It just kinda happened. I was lazy at the time so it took me a long while before I actually took off the link to his site, but oh well. Arch started slowly building his site and I kinda got interested in a variety of things and didn't pay as much attention to mine.

On a side note, here's some information about Fire Emblem Universe. Arch created it as a simple IPBFree forum and advertised it on Fire Emblem Anthology, an old Fire Emblem forum. I was the 7th member to join (yes, I do remember) but because it wasn't too active and neither was I. At some point I decided to start being active and post around. I enjoyed my time there and met new people. It also became a pretty good place for hacking, and in the present it is currently the best hacking resource alive, and it was that way for a long time, and I do believe it will take a while before any site surpasses FEU's reputation as a great Fire Emblem hacking forum.

Within a while FEU started doing things on its own although I remained (for the most part) a loyal member. The dates get fuzzy once again but it at some point switched to IPB, and then its IPB forums got deleted or something. Once again it moved, but this time it was moved to SMF (Simple Machine Forums), and after a longer while it moved to IPB, where it currently is hosted. I think that's enough information for now, right? I mean, this is the Fire Emblem Shrine, not the Fire Emblem Universe. ^_^

Left to Rot

I, Blazer, became more busy with school and interested in various other things besides my site. I didn't update it or advertise it as much-- in fact, for a long period of time, I generally avoided it, only checking in for small things like statistical updates, making sure the page was working, and occasionally updating saying "I'll do more stuff soon", but I never really got motivated to.

With great neglection comes little responsibility. The site got even less page views than before and I wasn't keeping up with the times too much. Simply put, the Fire Emblem Shrine was left to rot.

Somewhat Alive: 50Webs Era

After some time, perhaps half a year or more, I'm not sure, I decided the current Fire Emblem Shrine layout kinda sucked, looked ugly, had a lot of design problems and aethestical problems. Thus began my 2nd major attempt at revamping a site's layout.

First of all, I was still on Freewebs, and it bothered me some. I didn't like the restrictions and a lot of aspects about how it worked. After some searching, I found a new site, which was misleadingly good. It had FTP, significantly more space and more general control over what I could do, and it sounded better to me for my purposes. With a "what the heck" attitude, I made an account at http://50webs.com for the Fire Emblem Shrine.

Now that this was done, I needed a new layout. I went to find a free template that I could edit to my liking. Without knowing very much HTML, and knowing practically no CSS, however, I had a hard time editing it much. The template had a red background and was an orange-red scheme. Now that I look back on it, it really wasn't that cool. It definitely doesn't live up to the current site!

There were some ugly theme graphics on there that I didn't like. I updated the Copyright, added some more menu categories, added links, and decided on where I would put affiliates. Then I transferred over my decent banner (it's not as good as the ones that I have today, XD) made by a generous friend of mine, and copied the new page over and over for every page I planned on having. Wee, fun.

I was all excited at the time, because this kinda thing where I make new sites/revamp old sites is always exciting at first. I edited the original website's homepage (at http://www.freewebs.com/fireemblemshrine/) to direct the user to the new website. If you try and look there now, it'll just take you to an error page, but that's because I effectively deleted the home page for the website. The new website was located at http://feshrine.50webs.com and I bugged everyone I knew about it within a few hours, even if it had practically no content and some of the pages were missing.

If you're wondering why the title for this section is named "Somewhat Alive", it is because some pages of the website were broken, there wasn't too much content (not that this site has much content even right now), and it wasn't getting too much activity either (I'm big about how many people visit one of my websites). Regardless, the era of the 50Webs website allowed the Fire Emblem Shrine to live, albeit barely, and inconsistently (it was in a choma every other month), such that I could eventually get back to my beloved site and actually make it worth visiting.

Feshrine.net - The Domain

Ah, "the domain"... Well, here's a secret I don't think I've told anyone. When I first got my domain name for the Fire Emblem Shrine, which I wanted oh-so-badly, I didn't even pay for it. Well, at least I don't think I did... Hah, here comes the memory loss~.

You see, at the time, register.com, a website that offers domains (amongst many other things), was having a special deal where they offered small businesses a free domain name for a year. I was like "What? That's amazing! It's not a scam, either? I'm totally getting it!". And so I did, and I chose none other than "feshrine.net"--all the other Fire Emblem websites with domain names also ended in 'net', which made sense, at least in my opinion, because the Fire Emblem Shrine is part of a network of Fire Emblem sites supplying information, and it has a forum with a network of members... or something. Okay, so maybe the logic isn't all there, but that's what I chose, and it was much shorter than putting the entire name in the domain, which would have been "fireemblemshrine.net".

Thus I signed up for my first ever real domain name. I had fake domain names like www.feshrine.tk and www.feshrine.vze.com and probably other random "fake" domain names before. But now I just felt really professional, and I felt like I had robbed register.com, because I didn't have to pay for my first year. Little did I know that paying for the next few years would be one of the biggest website dilemmas I'd ever have...

A New Start

A new domain name was great, but now I had to actually get a website. Now, back when I first created the outline for the history section of my website, I had a major idea for each section, with each section having some sort of main plot event. But now, I can't remember much of that, except that I know I used the template before this one, I believe. It was also red, like my other ones, except with a little orange.

I needed some content, so I started looking for people to hire, but I never really found anyone dedicated enough to helping me make pages, so I ended up slowly adding statistical pages and random pages--a lot of random pages. I believe that at this time I was hyped about having my domain and created a sub-site called http://mugen.feshrine.net which was all about my now discontinued MUGEN project, appropriately called Fire Emblem Mugen, which you should be able to find on this site to this day.

However, when getting new affiliates, and looking at other sites, I felt like I was missing something big... and that was a community. It was true. My three previous forums all died, and unfortunately, without much of a fight. The last one had a good fight, but even then, its post were only in the low thousands, with maybe less than a 100 members. Compared to say, Fire Emblem Planet, who was only born 2 years before me, I was nothing. And as sad as it is, that was the truth of the matter at the time.

FEShrine Forums IV

Thus, I created the Fire Emblem Shrine Forums IV. Why "IV"? Because that means 4 in roman numerals, and it was the 4th forum I created. This time, however, I planned to just spam about it everywhere, and best of all, I had loyal friends from websites like Fire Emblem Universe (cough DH_Ninja), Sealed Sword (a pretty much dead site now, unfortunately... it was awesome back in the day. I hope their administrator is doing well, we had good times...), and then there were people I just knew that didn't really hang around forums too much, and people from another dead website called GameTalk. In other words, I knew enough people to get my site going, and I was a persistent guy. I'd post as much as I needed to and make as many topics as I needed to in order to keep my site alive. And heck, that still applies. I mean, no offense to Fire Emblem, but with the way it is now, there's just not enough Fire Emblem stuff to talk about to keep communities roaring with activity.

Anyway, these forums were the most successful forums I'd had. Not only that, but with the members I had there, I felt like I was at home. We had our ups and downs with activity and drama, but every forum had that. Anyhow, I'd really like to thank the old staff back then, people like DH_Ninja and Mori and Tino and even the lazy Felover3 and anyone else I missed because I'm sure there were people back then that I missed... Oh, Soren, one of our few female members. Yeah, those were good days, but like with all good days, time moves along...

Moving Along

Lost...

The Forum Crash

The forum crash... A stain in the history of our forums. Oh no, this one wasn't where the forum just died off due to inactivity. The forum crashed. I should have known it would happen, because these kind of things happened when you used free hosts. But I wasn't smart and like most things I couldn't predict because I'm not psychic... Man, sometimes I wish I were psychic.

Anyway, back to the issue. It seems to me that, after forums get too big, InvisionFree just feels like deleting them. Maybe it was just that--we had gotten too epic for a free host. Maybe someone reported us for abuse and InvisionFree didn't feel like actually checking to see if we had actually done anything wrong, because I doubt they would have found anything. Or maybe it was just an accident on Invision's part... who knows. It's over with, and there's nothing I can do, so I'll leave it at that.

The forums crashed. If you want to know when, I can give you a real good guess. Since I joined the current forums, FESFV, the forums made right after FESFIV's crash, on November 26th of 2008 (hah, that was a while ago!), I'm guessing the forums crashed the day before, November 25th, of 2008.

Okay, so problem solved, I just make a new forum on jcink instead of InvisionFree. What was the big deal?

...WHAT DO YOU MEAN "what's the big deal"?! I lost about 25,000 posts (about 2.4k of which were mine, funny enough), tons of members, and I had no way to contact most of the members who had joined the board. I couldn't go into my admin CP and make an offline message saying "okay everyone, relocate!", or give an e-mail to everyone about the new address. I just had to spread it by word and hope that those members were either on AIM or some other forum, because if they weren't, they were gone, and that terrified me, because I hate losing friends. As a kid, I lost friends, and I just stopped talking to them, and it's sad, and I hate that feeling. That's why I was terrified of that feeling.

Ultimately, yes, everything worked out. I was determined to make my forum successful so I just made one of my big posts about how sad everything was and how dumb Invisionfree was. And then I started playing around with the many new features I got on Jcink, and we had a good time on the new forums. In fact, the forums got a new link of http://forums.feshrine.net (instead of feshrine.b1.jcink.com) because I had learned how to better make use of my domain name. I guess sometimes when bad things happen, they allow for change for the better... if only that were always the case.

Because when my domain name expired and I couldn't get it back up for a few days, nothing good came out of that. It was bad. I now refer to that infamous time as "The Domain Incident".

The Domain Incident

"The Domain Incident"--a pretty scary title, right? I sure think so. But hey, it was really dramatic back in the day. It was a while though, so I can't recall all the details, so instead I'm going to paste over the thread I made once I finally got the domain back up after it being down for a couple of days.

My domain, feshrine.net, expires on January 25th, 2009. This being said, I originally renewed it with GoDaddy for two years, "transferring" it. However, I didn't know that I never actually finished the transferring process, so when it came to expire it actually DID expire (despite me renewing it).

I panicked and went to notify everybody on AIM, the AIM Blast, as well as PM everyone. I gave the URL to the forum, the alternate URL, http://feshrine.b1.jcink.com. I don't like people using this but just to keep the site in tact I had to.

Now I started to find out what was wrong. I looked up FAQs and became aware that I hadn't finished. I desperately made phone calls and managed to get to the point of an authorization code. Luckily I got it, however they [support team] also had to change some administrative info, and weren't able to. This problem was caused by the domain being expired already and making some things 'not work'. They said that they'd try and fix it and so I hung up and hoped that everything would be OK.

The next morning I got a little frustrated and so I called my domain registrar up again. This time, a lady with an accent helped me. She said that I would have to renew the domain with the current registrar and then wait a week before I could transfer it to GoDaddy. This being said, I remembered that yesterday, Ralph, the guy I was speaking to, offered to have me stay with my current Registrar for a domain for $9.99.

So, I talked to the person on the phone and said that yesterday, the person I was talking to, offered to have me renew the domain for a year for $9.99. She agreed and so we did it; I gave all my information and renewed it. :)

Soon after the new expiration (and current one) became 1/25/2010. Some of my information was updated, but not all of it. I still had to wait a week before I transferred. In any case, I updated the information back and she told me that it would take some time before everything came back to normal. This being said, it will take some time for the domains and WHOIS and such to update, but once it's all "propagated", as she said it, everything will be back to normal. If you're viewing the forum under http://forums.feshrine.net then everything already IS back to normal. If not, then it might be or it might not; the max time it should take is 24 hours or so, according to her. That's pretty much the full story. Thanks to DH_Ninja and felover3 for being sympathetic/motivational. XD


Aaaaand that's essentially the story: for a couple of days I freaked out because the mainsite was down and the forums were online but hardly anyone knew because the URL we usually use wasn't working. And as an admin I take my job seriously (sometimes) so it really was a freakout, especially given that I was only 14 years old at the time, so I wasn't familiar with any of the stuff, really. Ah, alas, we overcame it, and now it's just a small speck in the history of the Fire Emblem Shrine.

A New Look

You may be looking at the site now and thinking "it doesn't look too bad" or maybe you're just not thinking anything at all--but in any case, the site didn't always looked like this. On the contrary, it looked pretty bad--kind of like crap. Granted the web design standards back in the day weren't NEARLY as high as they are now, but still--just imagine a crappy free template gone to hell and back with random inconsistent HTML edits. That was the old site.

I had to do something. And so I started what at the time was the biggest design project of my life. With the help of Tino, a former staff member and capable web designer himself, I learned CSS and using a very basic template, sent the layout to hell and back. I loved the color red and still do and knew I wanted that to be the focus of my site. I also took inspiration from some other Fire Emblem sites. Loving the GBA games, I implemented the little map sprite icons for the navigation bars, and rectangles are rather appealing to me, so I decided on many of those.

I'm also a guy who likes quantity--many small pages beats a few quality pages, to me, sadly, and you can sure as heck tell if you just look at the site now. Most of the pages are near empty content-wise, but I still have a crap ton of them.

So I slowly worked on that for a few months, updating with progress on the forums. I also had help from my awesome graphics artist, Shu, who designed an awesome Roy banner to fit the site theme perfectly. I also incorporated some new site revampings besides just updating the looks--I began to use tables to organize info and added many new pages such as the search page, hall of fame, atheneum, hacking realm (which is currently our most popular section), and more. Noting that the site was created with HTML, having to update navigation bars requires me to update every page manually: thus I decided that content pages would not have navigation bars so that I wouldn't have to update them and they could have purely content. As a means of getting back, I added "breadcrumbs", the links to the site "directories" in the black bar on the site.

And if you ask me, the site was a success. The new layout was much more attractive, well-refined, and I don't know, smoother? I mean, you can see it now, and think what you will, but the old look was crap, so it didn't really matter what the new look was, as long as it was "A New Look" it was "A Good Look".

The Present... As of 2012

Ah, the "present"--no, not the gifts, the time period. When is the "present", might you ask? The present is any time that I feel like, really. There haven't been any major site events, as far as I know, since the domain incident and the new layout. Sure, there's been drama with sprite theft, people being banned, bots, trolls, and the site went down a couple of times, but it's nothing a little finger-muscle-on-keyboard action can't take care of.

But hey, there's still a point to all of this! I'm going to update this with memorable moments for the Fire Emblem Shrine. Hell yes we had a bunch of memorable moments. For example, we had this "Lifeless" fad where on the forums, everyone became lifeless beings, a reference to Tales of Symphonia. It got kind of weird after a while but we had other ones, like the Pokemon fad, where the most active members were named after characters in Pokemon--except we didn't use anime names, we used the names of characters like "Red", "Blue", "Green", etc., so people who weren't familiar with Pokemon thought we were just naming ourselves after colors. In actuality, it was more of a reference to Palette Town.

We had a few spriting competitions, the hiring of a new moderator, bblues, and the resignation of an old friend and staff member of mine, Tino, who I still think fondly of to this day for his contributions to the community, including but not limited to moderating, administration, and helping with the mainsite design.

The forum had its tough moments too--at one point, I thought it'd die, but my members are the best, and they always come through for me. Seriously, I've met so many friends on the Fire Emblem Shrine, mainly the forums, it's amazing, and I'm a very sentimental guy so you better believe I care about every guy I've had one of my nice friendly chats to on the forums. And I had a lot of friendly chats. :D

There were many website problems, too, but they weren't as dramatic, because I had a whole forum backing me up. You can check them in the News & Announcements forum archive, but why relive the bad days when you can live out better ones right now, right? Many good things happened--new veterans, the announcement of Fire Emblem for the 3DS... hey, that wasn't all that long ago! Yeah, time flies by, doesn't it? And I eventually finished something I had meant to do for years: make a directory of Fire Emblem patches/hacks on the mainsite, and I did it, and it felt great. I truly believe that the site is a great place for hackers to find hacking resources and now find many great patches to play, and I don't say it out of pride or ego but happiness that I could do something for the Fire Emblem community, no matter how insignificant.

We've had many other cool forum activities, too--scavenger hunts, a forum hack called "Fire Emblem: Chronicles" that died out, which was replaced by a very new community hack (not run by me though) called Fire Emblem: Immortal Shrine, and some RPs, like the it's-so-old-it's-nostalgic "Ragnarok Tournament", unique to the Fire Emblem Shrine, featuring an arena of fantasy RP characters brawling it out in epic, vivid, detailed matches. Heck, it's May of 2012 right now and we're heading into Summer, and I'm doing a month of awesome video game quotes to let the members guess on, and it's fun, and we've got a lot of cool members, even if many of the old faces aren't around anymore.

And I like the Fire Emblem Shrine, and it's a great place, and I don't care how old I am, I have no intention of leaving it behind anytime soon. And even if I did, I don't think it's up to me, anymore, because it's evolved into something much greater than a hobby. We're a bunch of whacky, fun, fun-loving, funny, writers, hackers, spriters, chatters, psychos, kids, teens, adults, geeks, emos, whatever, but most of all, we're all awesome in our, unique way, and if you wanna understand, well first, you gotta know our history. ^_^

A New Step Forward

With many things in life, there comes a time when it becomes outdated, and it's no longer up to par with standards. Such was the fate of our old, blazing red layout, which I have decided to take a small screenshot of. It's not that we don't like the color red, but the layout was years old, and far too clumsily made, with various issues and inconsistencies all over, not to mention broken links and pages.

Thus, the core of the Fire Emblem Shrine staff... or rather, all of the Fire Emblem Shrine staff, decided to collectively work towards building a newer, fresher site that would inspire more people to visit and explore the website, as well as do the Fire Emblem series a little bit more justice. Featuring easier to navigate menus, an expanded width, less blood-boiling colors, new content thanks to Seraphinox and amazing graphics all over thanks to Shu, the new site layout is what you're probably seeing now--unless there's already been another overhaul, in which case you may want to scroll down and see if there isn't another section in our site's history.

The new site took quite a while to create, mostly built over the last few weeks of the summer, but in progress even beyond that, and to be honest, it was a long-time coming. In comparison, the old layout really wasn't that good, and it was about time we truly dedicated some time to updating the site's content. It makes better use of our paid hosting, as well, though I felt that since advertisements would sully the new look, we might need some donations to keep the site going. More importantly, I'm sure that with it, there will be plenty of success and happiness for the Fire Emblem Shrine and its visitors in the near future.

~ Blazer