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How did Shibuya Daze come to be? Well, in all honesty, it was a drunken idea. Take two parts alcohol, combine it with one part youthful enthusiasm, another part youthful indiscretion, and top that all off with a final part of money to burn, and look at what you have! The time of your--err, correction, our--lives!
 But no, in all seriousness, we started this site just to be able to keep all our friends up-to-date on our adventures halfway around the globe. Jared and I both wanted to have somewhere we could upload pics, videos, stories, and whatever else suited our whim, without having to worry about infriging on copyrights or inappropriate content or terms of use or anything else along those lines.
The idea came to us just two or three days before we departed for Tokyo back in late 2008. All it took was a few minutes of tossing around the idea before we came up with a name, Shibuya Daze. Looking back, I believe the name was actually Jared's idea. See, Shibuya is the 20-something party district in Tokyo, the place to be for locals. Fuck all the tourists in Roppongi, that is too stereotypical; as I have previously stated, we wanted to live as locals. But don't get me distracted, leave that for the locations page. But long story short, Jared picked the name and I bought the domain and got to work.
Personally, I am an old-school scripter (I know, some of you are like WTF, he is still young, how can he be old-school?!?); Well, I prefer to use Notepad and write everything from scratch--HTML, DHTML, JavaScript, even PHP if required. I have tried using numerous programs thoughout the years, and while maybe I have just not found the one for me, I do so prefer doing it all by hand, even if it is much more time-consuming. Much more...
So when Jared and I first decided that we absolutely needed this site up and running in order to document our adventures, I wasted no time. I whipped up a couple minor graphics and a basic layout, then just duplicated it for each page. I was not worried about any issues I might have trying to update the site from across the globe, because it was still so new, still just an infant amongst the ever-stretching internet.
 Above and to the right is an old screenshot of the original Daze, as she appeared last, just before I took her out back and gave her the Ol' Yeller treatment... Simple but sweet. So smooth and elegant. Almost miss her in a way... But its like an old girlfriend: You can never go back, no matter how tempting--cause there is always a reason you left in the first place. And trust me, you don't want to remember that, you don't want to bring up the past! I have made that mistake before...
Regardless, she served us well our first year, most definitely. It was only as I got sucked into my return visits to the Philippines for ol' girl that I came to desire a new, more fashionable layout. And what resulted? The little-loved, much-hated Shibuya Daze 2.0--just like Windows Vista!
As you can see from the screenshot below, it was a nice, clean, fresh layout that I had created, and was very proud of it. Again, I built the whole thing using Notepad, but this time, I used Adobe Photoshop CS3 (what?!? CS4 is out now?!? damnation...) for all the graphic design. However, it was too labor-intensive from the start, so it was eventually doomed... I had 110+ panoramic pictures of various places around Tokyo, all absolutely magnificent works of art, and a different one lining the top of each page. What really made it tedious though was having to break the master image down into smaller ones for the banner, the buttons, the logo... And then there was the fact that I made a simple JavaScript rollover for the buttons, so each button needed a plain b&w copy, plus a full color copy with the section title on it, for when the cursor moused over that button. That resulted in over 1,000 images just pertaining to the layout, totally excluding the 2,000+ photos also included in the site.
And the web site turned out great; it looked fantastic. The only problem was I built it testing the site only with Firefox, never once considered viewing it with Internet Explorer (fuck IE!) or even Google Chrome. So what happens? Yeah, sure enough, IE did not like my image rollover script and besides being slow to load said scripting, it had all kinds of issues with my CSS that Firefox just did not have!
Obviously, right then and there I decided that I needed to re-design the site yet again. I just loathed to do it because I was on yet another vacation--hey, before you complain, that is the only reason I work as hard as I do: for vacations!
So once again, on June 21st, 2009, I began work on the new Shibuya Daze 2.1, revised and streamlined for your viewing pleasure! That end result is what you see here. And of course I did compatibility testing between various browsers, to confirm that everyone has the same experience here at SD. However, if you should come across any issues or broken links, please let me know. I tried my best to double-check everything, but you never know, something could have slipped by.
I have already begun crafting ideas for Shibuya Daze 3.0, and I am already prepared with the newest version of Adobe Dreamweaver, so I am set to take things up a notch with this one. It probably will not debut until spring 2010 though. With as much work as I have put into SD trying to revamp it the last year, I do not want to have to do anything but upload pictures and stories for awhile.
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