KuraFire Network

Last Friday was the one-year anniversary of version 8 of the KuraFire Network, as well as the FACE project. It went by without so much a whisper, albeit unintentionally. Ordinarily, I use X-year anniversaries to reflect on what's happened and changed in the past year, how it has influenced my life and so forth. This year, though, what happened was me making a decision and that decision made me totally forget to write about V8 and FACE. I made the decision to take my site in a new direction entirely.

When I started the KuraFire Network, it was a portal to several sites I was running and/or starting up at the time. As time passed, these other sites were either laid to rest, merged into this site or postponed until further notice. Eventually, though, all of them were being removed from the public and most of them have, effectively, been killed off by now due to a lack of time or interest.

Throughout its lifespan so far, the KuraFire Network has been about many things; in part because there was a long period in the middle where it also ran a small forum community called "the Couch", which created new topics such as anime, interesting quotes and roleplaying. However, for me, the site was dominated by one thing specifically: web development.

I loved working on the site, tweaking it, learning more about web development - like many people in this industry, or at least our Standards-evangelizing corner of it, I am completely self-taught, fueled simply by my passion for the web - and whether I was programming new features like a Journal system (think LiveJournal integrated on the forum), designing new versions or producing wallpapers and digital art, in the end I was having fun because it allowed me to do more web development. I was creating something and the Web was the way of making it all come to life.

But there's the crux: I only ever started with web development because of an earlier passion of mine, writing. I wanted to write fanfiction for Final Fantasy VII, and share it with friends and complete strangers. This was sometime around 1997-'98. It was in the middle of the advent of the Web, and so I figured I should create a website to put my stories on. Little did I know, back then, how incredibly much that decision would change my life.

Now, I feel like it's time to complete the circle. I've taken my passion for web development to pretty much the highest level I can imagine, or want to imagine in any case, and have no desire to take it much further right now. There are still some things I want to do and/or achieve, some pretty big things even, but they are offshoots. They are not tied to this site, but simply to my place in web development land.

For the KuraFire Network, it means that I'm going back to my roots: writing. To be more clear, writing stories - be it single scene shorts, short stories or ongoing ones. We'll see. Whatever it'll be, though, it won't be about web development. I'll be doing plenty enough writing about that each day at work, and for five or six months now I've had little interest to blog about the web-scene, for reasons that are my own.

I'm adding my other (other?) passion as well, which is photography. It's a passion I've only recently discovered, in the grand scheme of things (the KuraFire Network goes back to Angelfire and Geocities pages from the late 90's) but it's something I want to incorporate in my site very much. I've had a redesign idea in my head ever since I got my Canon 350D in July and discovered how much fun I had taking pictures with it. I have no idea when I'll have time to actually get this redesign (nay, realign ;)) happening, but whatever. I'm in no rush.

Meanwhile, though, I plan on migrating my site from Snelsite (the CMS I created the original version of for my previous employer) to Django, as soon as I can find some time to actually get into Django properly. So far, I've only been scratching its surface but haven't had a chance to go further. I'm wondering whether Django 1.0 will be out before I get to it or not. We'll see.

A possible side-effect of that, though, is that I may very well "flatten" my site at some point in the near future. If and when I do, it means the Comments system will be disabled and Search will be re-routed to Google. Everything else should continue to work as usual. There will be an announcement posted when this happens, though.

So that's how it is. Big changes afoot, no time frame indication whatsoever… I have to say, that's quite typical for the KuraFire Network as it's occurred several times in its 8 or 9-year history. I guess that's what a personal sandbox is for, though, right?

For now, I wish everyone a very merry Christmas and a happy new year, and I'll see you in 2007!

- Faruk Ateş

Bookmark: Newsvine del.icio.us Digg