The New Home of New Trials: The History of Wish For a Star: A CCS Shrine

Many apologies for the fiasco last week when revolutionhosting.net officially closed down after 7 years of business, leaving the website inaccessible for a couple days. Luckily, I was able to get in touch with Robert Arrowsmith, formerly from the revolutionhosting.net team, who speedily responded and has very kindly agreed to continue hosting Wish For a Star: A Card Captor Sakura Shrine on his newly opened web hosting business at http://www.robswebsites.com. The good news is, the website remains as http://wishluv.revolutiohosting.net, less confusion that way. Thank you very much for all of you who have expressed concerned and offered help; I was very touched by the support, and this whole business was a very educational experience. Robert kindly moved all my files to the new server and has set up an account for me at robswebsites, making a very smooth transition, and I am very excited for a new beginning, a new decade more of New Trials! 

So once more, many thanks to Robert and http://www.robswebsites.com for hosting The New Trials of Card Captor Sakura!!!

This whole experience has been a spring-cleaning reminder for me, and I thought it would be interesting to draw up the history of New Trials on the web.

The History of New Trials Website Timeline


Fall 1999 - As a 13 year old, I began writing the New Trials of Card Captor Sakura, Syaoran and Friends. The first couple chapters of New Trials was sent to three or four Card Captor Sakura fanfiction sites that could be found on anipike.com, all of which our no longer in existence to my knowledge.


Fall 2000 - I first created Wish For a Star: A CCS Shrine, a site dedicated to Card Captor Sakura and my fanfiction at the now defunct as of 2010 geocities.com. Old-timers will remember the days of exceeding bandwidth and geocities being down to much of our chagrin. Kirei Blossom pointed out to me that an archive of the site can be found at http://www.oocities.com/wishluv/index2.htm. 


October 2000 - Digidynasty created an account for New Trials at fanfiction.net and maintained the account till 2006-ish, followed up by Amethyst Beloved who maintained the ff.net account until late 2009, when I took over uploading chapters. The 26th marked "Wish-chan's" 10 year-anniversary on http://www.fanfiction.net/u/23409/Wish_Chan.


August 2003 - Bilal from revolutionhosting.net kindly offered to host Wish For a Star: A CCS Shrine and thus created the account of http://wishluv.revolutionhosting.net. For 7 years, I had wonderful hosting at Revolutionhosting.

February 4, 2004 - Kirei Blossom opened up the Yahoo Group: The New Trials Ring, home of all discussions relating to Card Captor Sakura, CLAMP, fanfiction and New Trials at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/newtrialsring and remains administrator of the group with Selenityshiroi.  


January 2008 - Began posting fanart up at http://wishluv.deviantart.com.

February 2009 - I started a blog at http://wishluv.blogspot.com to post New Trials updates and other various information, reviews and commentaries. 


October 17, 2010 - Revolutionhosting.net officially shut down without notice, throwing me into a state of panic. I looked into many different server options and everybody had been very helpful via Yahoo Group, this blog, email and Facebook. I got in touch with Robert Arrowsmith who was a part of the Revolutionhosting team. He had opened up a new web hosting service site at http://www.robswebsites.com and kindly offered to continue to host wishluv.revolutionhosting.net with the same conditions as I had at revolutionhosting.net, even retaining the same domain name. Robert is the awesome hero who moved all my files over to the new server and even preserved my old stats from revolutionhosting and deserves a holler of thanks. 


October 27, 2010 - An FTP account has been created for me by Robert at http://www.robswebsites.com and the move is complete. The website address remains at http://wishluv.revolutionhosting.net and is now hosted at robswebsites.  



Looking back, it seems like fall-time has generally been an eventful period for New Trials. Because of the impermanence of the web, I think I've learned that it's important to have multiple back-ups of everything. It's bittersweet thinking that New Trials has been reborn three times already in the past ten years. First as a nomad fanfiction being hosted on other CCS fanfic sites. Sadly, I don't even remember what they were called because they no longer exist. Then the first home at Geocities, which disappeared earlier this year. Revolutionhosting also is gone. Now, New Trials is in its fourth home, fourth arc, and I am very excited and dedicated to bringing about the finale of New Trials!


Music Spotlight du jour is another oldie from the nineties (which doesn't seem so long ago to me). This whole experience has been about planning ahead, but ended up being a trip down the memory lane. You know those songs that seem to transport you back in time to a certain period? This song was the theme song at my junior high Semi-Formal (and probably was the theme song for every other school dance party in the late nineties). It played over and over again that night, and throughout 1998, on the radios, on TV, in stores, to the point where I never wanted to listen to it again. Yet, all these years later, it is still a beautiful song and no one can deny that it's a nineties love song classic which probably will be remembered for decades to come. This was a song that was ironically constantly on my playlist as I wrote Chapter 66: The Truth in the Heart. Savage Garden ever-so-popular almost to the point of cliche song, "Truly, Madly, Deeply." Yes, cheesy nineties pop songs are healing to the soul and brings out the wide-eyed, teenage romantic in all of us.