domain

I bought ayustory.org in April 2008 for the express purpose of being my Ayumi Hamasaki collective. There's a formula I've noticed with my sites — if I have more than five relating to one main subject, I end up getting a domain for it. I'd wanted to get an Ayu-centric domain for quite a while, but my biggest problem was what the heck do I call it? The ideal name for me was mystory.org, as it's my favorite album and the name of my personal tribute to Ayu, but of course it was taken. My next idea was endless-sorrow.org, since it's my favorite Ayu song; the only problem with that was that it was way too long for me.

What came next was a bout of largely unproductive brainstorming in which I tried to turn her song names into viable domain names; the only name I even liked out of those was still-alone.net. I do love the song still alone, but the name just wasn't personal enough for me, and I still really wanted something with "story" in it. And then the name I'd been looking for the whole time just kinda popped out at me: ayustory.org. And all was well.

Layout

The inaugural layout of ayustory.org features Ayu, naturally, and the image is from the October 2003 issue of Ready Go! magazine. It took me ages to decide on an image to use, but I really like how this layout came out. I haven't made many dark layouts recently, so I'm glad this one looks as good as it does. Apple Garamond is used all over, though regular Garamond and Times New Roman serve as the substitute fonts. No other resources were used to make the layout — it's just a default Photoshop brush in the image, and the magical rollovers on the network page are powered by my l33t CSS skillz.