Happy 7th Birthday Ani-Pock!

Hard to believe it's been seven years since Ani-Pock started!

Ani-Pock started out hosting Nanaca Crash (original post still up!) after Dom at MegaTokyo put up a post about it. 

The day after, Ani-Pock was hit with 20,000 people coming to play Nanaca Crash.

At the time, Ani-Pock had no name, it was a single page with Nanaca Crash and a score board I maintained, along with live chat in the form of a cbox. Here's an example of a cbox (not the original one we started with), it was a kind of chatbox that had to refresh after sending each message.

On the cbox I met TeenLink, who came up with the name Ani-Pock, or Anime+Pocky.

After Nanaca Crash, I launched an anime hosting section, where we showed new episodes each Monday and Thursday. You can see the last three we ran were Rizelmine, Gunbuster 2 and Pita Ten.

These were in the days before YouTube and other video streaming services. Anime was a hard to get thing on the net back in 2005/2006! Then YouTube came on the scene and I remember how interesting it was- a little box (as in 320X240 as the max resolution I believe) where you could watch very short grainy clips.

For comparison, today you can watch an HD clip on YouTube that has a resolution of 1920X1080!

Ani-Pock also had some smaller sites, and some of my favorites, including PockyWorld. Here's the link to PockyWorld 2, it was then a "secret". PockyWorld was a place for make believe, we used a virtual map to update and tell our story.

Of course Drawing was also a huge part of Ani-Pock. I picked up some code from Flash-Gear, and even today the drawboards remain powered it. I've had a few chances to work with the developer of the system from time to time on the year, he's impressed we still use his system in fact!

Ani-Pock was started when I was just finishing high school.

In my years at college, we had a lot of fun together, and I'm so happy for all the friends I've made on here with you. It's been 3 years since I've graduated from college now, and things have been pretty interesting between a few different projects I've been working on.

As a result, Ani-Pock hasn't changed much in that time, in fact I think I reverted the design to an older one!

This year, iDisk, Apple's web hosting service which has hosted Ani-Pock from day one, will be going offline. Worry not, I will be picking up a server to replace it. As for the Ani-Pock URL, it will not be going anywhere. I'll always hang on to it, so we can keep in touch.

The web is sure to change in that time, so I'm capturing an image of the site right now, today for us to look at in the future. I'll do my best to keep Ani-Pock up, and of course with some chat system so we can stay in touch. Anyone remember Gabbly? If you know how to write computer code, I have some old logs from Gabbly it would be fun to "playback". 

I'll leave you with some of my favorite images this blog has posted over the years.

Thank You!

Pocky