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2004-2006: Birth and development of the site
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This first page covering the 2004-2007 period was written by CyberjujuM. It's a copy of a birthday file the webmaster made in 2007. What better to use to trace the site's history than its creator's words... | | |
 | From the birth of CodeLyoko.fr to its 3rd birthday: The memoir of a Toulousain man | |
|  | For this slice of history, I, CyberjujuM, will be your narrator!
I'll try to retrace the key moments in the history of CodeLyoko.fr since its creation... Creations or heavy modifications of sections, new services, new recruits, domain names, servers... So you'll find it easy to understand that if there's a gap between two dates, it's not that we didn't do anything then; I think this recount is long enough as it is ;p
I'll start this retelling of the site's history with the traditional “3 years already!” Indeed, already 3 years since the CodeLyoko.Fr adventure began, with a small site that didn't even yet have this name and wasn't, at the beginning, destined for such a future as this...
27 July 2004. It had been a few days since I'd discovered Code Lyoko, and my site about the cartoon that I really liked is finished. Nothing phenomenal, a few pages, a simplistic design (others would call it ugly :p), hosted on Multimania (ugh). It grouped together information on the history of Code Lyoko, its locations, its characters. The music from the opening “Un monde sans danger” (“A World Without Danger”'s French version) and its music video are available, as well as some goodies and a photo gallery. A page of polls and a chat topped it all off. I immediately registered the site on “Top Code Lyoko 2004”, hoping to see some visitors arriving!
30 July 2004. Multimanaia tells me that the site contains files that are too large, and stops hosting it. So I head over to my ISP, Cetegel's, hosting service, and create a forum on Aceboard at the same time (another ugh, I know, but the hosting proposed by my ISP was too limited for any other choice!). Some visitors arrived on the site, 2-3 members on the forum in the following days, but everything remained more or less calm...so I created a domain on ulimit.fr.st (ugh again...but free!): www.lyokocode.fr.st!
5 August 2004. Lilie joins the adventure, and becomes co-webmistress. The project then takes another turn, the work of two people increasing the motivation tenfold. She prepares episode summaries that are published in the eponymous section the next day, finds a good quality, free and advertisement-free guestbook provider, and I begin to prepare a second version...
8 August 2004: version 2 online! Development of the site accelerates. Throughout August, the site becomes richer: certain sections are completed while others make their appearance: episode downloads (which didn't last very long ;p), Garage Kids, Shopping, Character Galleries, Quiz, Season 2 File, Links... Version 2 quickly proves to be very impractical in terms of making updates, and at the start of September, I prepare version 3.
15 September 2004: version 3 opens its doors, with its heap of new stuff: games, fanart, fanfics, creations of all kinds, a section on the creators of the cartoon...and a new, ad-free domain on new.fr: www.lyokocode.new.fr. The sections continue to fill up, in October the class roster of characters appears, followed by the Newsletter in November, then the RSS feed in December.
After a number of enrichments to the whole site, the year of 2004 ended beautifully with a Christmas exclusive “Code Lyoko Theme Pack”, a pack of goodies (desktop background, screensaver, icons, cursors...) that ALH gave us!
2005 began strongly with the creation of the TV Schedule, Songs, Colouring Pages, XANA, Earth Locations and “How to draw” sections. March marked my first meeting Johann, who was already at the heart of two projects: FutuRadio (small webradio series created by and for teens) and IrcFunChat (small IRC network created...by and for teens :p). He introduced me to Arnold a few days later (the 15th of March to be precise!), whom I already knew a little thanks to the fanart he sent me. Arnold then begins to create banners for the site!
At the start of April, while I got to know Johann better and better, he offered me his services. So our chat is moved to IrcFunChat and FutuRadio is broadcast on the site.
May 2005: new turn in the adventure as our current domain name, CodeLyoko.Fr, is purchased the 2nd of May 2005! The CodeLyoko.Fr adventure becomes more dynamic than ever! More and more updates and permanent changes to existing sections, the episode scripts make their appearance, along with site statistics, the Quotes section, numerous bits of information and season 2 videos and the placement of the welcome page (an image with links to the Site/Forum). It was also unfortunately the end of the episode downloads page following a request from Moonscoop 
Several hosting problems were met during the summer of 2005, and the site is finally transferred to Free in July. The Opinions on the Show, CL News, Antefilms and List of Towers sections appeared, and a whole new welcome page was put in place. A V4 is anticipated for the site's birthday, the 27th of July 2005, but a hard disk crash pushes this date forward to the 1st of September, after a...very difficult transfer!
1 September 2005: version 4 marks a new turn in the adventure, technically as well as graphically. All the pages are redone, the design is completely renewed, and the site moves to PHP! First for the page inclusion system (no more iframes!), but also for all the little scripts such as visit counters, the news module, polls...which had beforehand been fulfilled by free services which no longer corresponded to my expectations and site traffic levels (services cut off at the end of each month because there was too much traffic for a free service to handle!).
The entire sites and its components are then hosted on a dedicated server (yes, dedicated :D) very kindly provided by Johann, with whom I am great friends and who will work more and more with me on the site.
As said higher up, the work of two people, and in general a team, is a great factor in motivation, and the development of CodeLyoko.Fr finds itself strongly accelerated... Johann hits the ground running by not only providing a server, but also helping to create V4, with a point of honour on the first PHP scripts (first version of the news script, counters, statistics...), we began working at incredible speeds. He's the one who got me interested in this fabulous language...and today I'm never leaving it, it's become a passion 
Arnold is also a great help as he gives me graphical advice for creating the general layout of the pages, menus and section titles. He's the one who creates the V4 banner, which would then undergo some changes on various occasions 
His role would become more and more dominant in everything concerning the site's graphics, and he quickly became our official graphic designer.
Meanwhile, season 2 of Code Lyoko began airing on France 3, and CodeLyoko.Fr put in place an idea that would very quickly spread: episode screenshots! Each time an episode aired, hundreds of images taken by Johann are made available in galleries!
Throughout September, the site continued to evolve and the Monsters and Possibilities of the Existence of Lyoko sections appeared. On the 16th of September, we reached 200 000 visitors.
Sections are quickly completed to keep up with the new stuff in season 2, and on the 2nd of November 2005 we launched the registration activations for LyokoMail V1, the @codelyoko.fr email box creation developed chiefly by Johann. On the 13th of November, he put the “Live Stats” section in place.
19 November 2005. Appearance of the Flash intro on the site's homepage thanks to Arnold, followed by small sound effects made when hovering over menus on the 20th, a forum intro on the 23rd, and an internal search engine on the 27th!
December 2005. After putting up the Christmas and Téléthon themes, Windows Live alerts were introduced.
The year of 2006 shot off with more updates to sections, the complete reworking of the Fanart and Member Wallpapers section, and the creation of the Files and CL in the Press sections. Cherry on the cake, the creation of the CodeLyoko.Fr logo by Arnold on the 21st of February!
That same day, a partner site of CodeLyoko.Fr, Code Lyoko version Marpessa, is integrated with CodeLyoko.Fr: this gave birth to the Goodies section!
The next day, CodeLyoko.Fr's sidebar makes its appearance, and on the 23rd of February all the site's images are swapped with season 2 ones. The History section then appeared, followed by the complete reconstruction of the Fanfiction and Songs sections. he galleries are fully loaded, and on the 2nd of March the site reaches 400 000 visitors.
At the end of March the chat is entirely redone, and the “Secret Diaries” page is created on the 9th of April in the “Extras” section. The milestone of 500 000 visitors is hit on the 26th of April.
At the start of May, Arnold made his own update system for updating the welcome image, and created the V2 logo. On the 20th of June, the bar of 600 000 visitors is broken.
27 June 2006. The “Musik & Videos” section, which contained...music and videos (:p) and which began to fill up a little too fast is replaced by a real media download system! So I replaced it with the newly-coded...Media section, where each media file has its own description and is organised into appropriate categories.
27 July 2006: the second LyokoContest is launched to celebrate the site's second birthday, with 50 questions about our site, our forum...and Code Lyoko! A treasure hunt is also organised, with 10 codes to find on the site and forum. Prizes were offered to the winners!
8 August 2006. The forum offers a completely knew design thanks to Arnold, but it's also the end of LyokoMail: account validation was done manually, and given the great success of the service, it quickly became impossible to keep up the pace. What's more, our dedicated server was becoming more and more full... Relieving it would be terrible, all we needed to wait for was a new server, our two servers being far too busy for the moment
The 31st of April, news posts took on their current design, thanks to Arnold! This was the appearance of our famous little blue boxes, which we enjoy very much, as we've spread many throughout the site From this day forward, all the sections would be progressively redone to take advantage of these pretty little boxes!
1 September 2006: the site reaches 700 000 visitors! The next day, the live stats script is put in place, and the day after that, Johann creates the “Singles chart” page, to celebrate the single “Un monde sans danger”'s entrance onto the top 100 chart!
4 September 2006. New turn in the history of CodeLyoko.Fr, with Shaka's arrival to the team, who took all of the written work of the site into his hands...he had a strong start with the “Story” section, and would rewrite each of our sections bit by bit, improving them until they became the most complete on the web 
The 9th of September marked the start of season 3: episode screenshots arrived on the site in their hundreds as the episodes aired, and a notice system for upcoming episodes was put in place on our homepage.
A huge update the next day: the appearance of the Episode Guide! PHP fever continued to burn on, and in its wake I made this huge part of the site to replace the “Episode Summaries” section. Resolutely more complete, it concentrated all the possible and imaginable information on the episodes of Code Lyoko, written by Shaka and aided by Callie Rose. The episode's script and gallery were added to each page. That same day, Shaka finished rewriting everything and completely finished the Monsters section.
16 September 2006: the site's Flash intro evolved, and on the 25th of September the Episode Guide gained the function that allowed users to score and comment on the episodes.
4 October 2006. The two-part prequel “XANA Awakens” temporarily appeared on the site and completed the “Story” section by telling us more about the series's beginnings!
Among permanent updates to the sections, the episode guide galleries were completed with the first season 1 galleries on the 21st of October and the next day, we reached 800 000 visitors. It was also the day I met Warton Chan, administrator of the American Lyokophile community Tech Links, who offered us Code Lyoko storyboards.
At the end of October I published a complete reworking of the news script, which finally allowed us to post news about the site and about Code Lyoko in the same place, in a conjoined interface. The two news categories are marked with [Site] and [Code Lyoko] tags, as well as a small icon. This new news script allowed Phoenix Wright to join the team as a news writer, while Logan took up post as a ripper/screenshooter!
4 November 2006: the episode guide changes again, with a filter for sorting episodes by broadcasting channel, some people not wanting to see the files of episodes that hadn't yet aired on France 3.
On the 8th of November season 3 ended, and the number of visitors on the site at one time exploded after the airing of episode 65 on Canal J. The record of simultaneous visitors is therefore established at 7:03pm with 105 simultaneous registered visitors!
19 November 2006 saw the appearance of an RSS feed of the most recent messages on the forum, accompanied by a more practical and nicer script for the most recent messages, as well as a new version (the current version) of the Media section, accompanied some days later by a new Flash intro for the forum!
After information and updates to sections of all kinds, the milestone of 900 000 visitors is reached on the 9th of December. Two days later, the Christmas contest is launched upon Johann's initiative, with a Planet Net single as the prize!
Christmas 2006 marked the arrival of the report on the interview with Sophie Decroisette, made a few weeks earlier. But the best was yet to come...
1 January 2007. The year of 2007 began brilliantly as the total reorganisation of the site came to a close. Galleries are completed, obsolete sections disappear, others are completed with pages that were previously spread across the four corners of the site, like the Files section. The ones that hadn't yet been looked over are done at last, such as the Shopping section, others are reorganised and completed, like Garage Kids and Moonscoop, but the biggest chunk of work concerned the Characters section, which is completely redone, reorganised, completed and embellished. The XANA section, also written by Shaka, makes its appearance a few days later.
Another huge new addition: Carthage Community, a memberspace that allowed for communication with other members of the site through private or instant messages, the creation of profiles, posting comments on all the site's news posts, scoring the site's games and accessing numerous other surprises that are currently being prepared at this moment...
The next day was even better: two enormous additions appeared in the episode guide! LyokoStats, a veritable database on Code Lyoko that allowed us to draw up statistics on each Lyoko Warrior's performance, episode by episode! The data, collected by Kris, was entered by Shaka into a brand new system, specially developed by me for the occasion.
And the cherry on the cake...a Video On Demand (VOD) system created entirely by our team that allowed you to watch the episodes of Code Lyoko online, FOR FREE! So it was gradually completed to progressively arrive at a catalogue of 52 episodes, in other words, all of seasons 1 and 2.
But this VOD is quickly suspended because on the 5th of January, we are obligated to cut this service due to the huge demand on our servers, even though we'd put restraints in place...the need for a second dedicated server could be felt! The same day, the module that allowed for writing and sending fanfiction through Carthage Community appeared thanks to Johann's help, as well as the Quiz! After several changes, the final version of the fanfiction section arrives (not counting a few small changes to follow ;)); thanks to the PHP/MySQL duo! That same evening, the little Aelita, our secondary server, is ordered from OVH!
The 13th of January marked the grand return of the VOD on Aelita, and at the end of January CodeLyoko.Fr passed the milestone of one million visitors!
Mid-February, the VOD finally contained all the episodes of seasons 1 and 2 of Code Lyoko, while the galleries were completed thanks to the season 2 part 1 DVD, and the Team page succeeded the Webmasters one!
At the end of February and the start of March, we needed to put in place certain protective measures against people who, our of jealousy (or stupidity!), tried to take down our site. As such March was a resolutely technical month that, thanks to Johann's installations and a few little protective scripts, allowed us to armour our server and site!
The start of March was also the start of a new era, that of season 4, thanks to season 4 spoiler images sent by Warton Chan! Thanks to Arnold, the site is then redone in the colours of this new season, rich in new additions (and which we're still waiting for in France as I'm writing this!)
The 14th of March, CodeLyoko.Fr's network enlarges! Johann and myself develop www.codelyoko-lejeu.fr, the site dedicated to the first Code Lyoko PC game, created by Kikou! The game was very successful and thanks to our servers, could be downloaded quickly by tens of thousands of fans. This is also the date Warton Chan entered the team, as an American news writer/reporter.
On the 17th of March, Carthage Community gets better with the automatic login function, while we continue to publish season 4 spoiler images thanks to Warton Chan! A small intrusion for the 1st of April, a XANAfied Aelita that was none other than some special effects by Arnold ;p
On the 2nd of April, Carthage Community boasts 1250 members, and on the 11th of April the Guided Tour section appeared, presenting the content offered by our site grouped together according to the user's knowledge of the world of Code Lyoko! That same day, our galleries were completed with high-quality screenshots from the season 2 part 2 DVD; and Jerem, webmaster of Code-Lyoko.Fr, joined our team as a news writer and offered us his domain name!
On the 13th of April, the Story and Monsters sections got facelifts, and were completed by Shaka to account for the latest information revealed by the end of season 3!
On the 15th of April, the Characters section is entirely completed with the return of the class roster, a file for each secondary character and a page on all the other characters that appeared in the cartoon! The main character files gained mini-galleries as well as the character's secret diary. This was also when the Podcasts section appeared, where nico233's Code Lyoko podcasts were published!
I finally put in place the new fanart section on the 18th of April which is (aside from some small updates) the version still in use today! With its module for sending art from Carthage Community, it quickly became a success.
The end of April saw the appearance of the countdown to season 4, a new Flash intro in season 4's colours, as well as a completely reorganised “TV Schedule” section But the nicest of all would have been the contest organised in collaboration with Moonscoop to celebrate the release of the DS game, which allowed 5 lucky winners to get free copies of Code Lyoko: Get Ready to Virtualize! This was also when CL_Adrien arrived on the team, as a news writer!
Amidst news on the cartoon's universe and various and diverse updates, a small surprise is organised on the 19th of May to celebrate the airing of the first episode of season 4 in the USA, William Returns. A large file on Code Lyoko's grey areas is put online the same day.
At the end of May, Carthage Community gets better with two new practical functions (lost password and resend activation email) while the team splits into four upon the arrival of season 4 in the USA to provide you with spoiler screenshots with as short a delay as possible.
June was a very bad month for our main server as, among other problems, XANA was literally toasted on the 6th of June in the middle of the night. Thanks to successive interventions by Johann, the site quickly went back online
Mid-June, the majority of the team passes the BAC (French end-of-high-school exam), which doesn't prevent us from offering you a complete update to the episode guide on the 15th of May, with a complete season 1 gallery in high quality, thanks to DVDs imported from the USA! This is followed by a small updates to sections to add some images from season 1
A big day for CodeLyoko.Fr, the 24th of June marked the start of using Aceboard for our forum! A whole new forum is placed on our secondary server, with new functions and a brand new design! Thanks to a homemade system, all messages and member profiles were conserved, a first for any forum on the web moving to Aceboard. A new start for our dear forum therefore...which would be completed bit by bit with a number of updates (more design features, more functions...).
4 July 2007. Arrival of codelyokomania on the team as a news writer, who would bring various information on season 4 to us!
The 5th of July would be a massive day! A large number of news posts are made following the advance screening of Code Lyoko season 4, organised by Moonscoop in Paris. Our site benefited from invitations, Shaka and Cely were on site and we concocted a large file on this event, thanks to which we were able to tell you a lot about season 4 and Code Lyoko in general.
18 July 2007: slideshow mode appeared on all the site's galleries, which were updated thanks to episode galleries made a few weeks earlier; and our main server is completely updated.
Several days later, a large maintenance operation allowed us to increase the site's global speed; and after a few other news posts and updates, we come to today, when we are preparing this large birthday file!
Rumours are circulating as to whether a version 5 is currently being conceived...time will tell | | |
| | Johann's testimony, also from the 2007 birthday file.
CodeLyoko.fr, much more than a simple website, is an adventure that, for 3 years now, has brought together a small team that works together around the same project that grows, evolves and becomes enriched each day as we do.
CodeLyoko.fr is a unique experience, aligning passion for the cartoon universe, new technologies and the world of the web, which mixes incredibly varied knowledge and skill sets, allowing each member of the team to enrich themselves each day.
CodeLyoko.fr is an uncommon human experience, which assembled and united fans from diverse horizons, and drew strong lines of friendship.
But CodeLyoko.fr is also...
- 3 years, or 1095 days old
- 4 domain names with which to access it
- A dozen subdomains
- Version 4 of the site
- 20.5GB of data
- More than 600 MySQL tables
- 2 data centre servers
- 2 server power source changes
- 1 motherboard, 2 sticks of RAM and 1 grilled server processor
- 3 damaged file systems
- 1 MySQL crash
- 2 half-baked Plesk updates
- 3 power failures
- 3 functioning hard disks
- 2 daily backups
- More than a hundred Euros each month
- 10MB/s to 15MB/s bandwidth at peak hour
- More than 2TB of traffic each month
- 2000 members on the site and 1300 members on the forum (more than 2000 inactive members removed during the transfer!)
- More than 3300 private messages sent via Carthage Community
- 553 fanarts and 76 fanfictions
- One to two hundred emails per day
- More than 35 different mailboxes
- More than 460 news posts and over 4750 comments in V4
- 11 people working on the site
- 9 on the forum
- 4 on both of them
- Between 5000 and 7000 visits to the site per day
- Between 900 and 2000 visits to the forum per day
- Between 180 000 and 215 000 visits per month
- An average of 1 050 000 hits per day
- An average of 780 000 files and 100 000 pages per day
- More than 2 330 000 pages viewed each month, and 32 300 000 hits per month
- Visitors from more than 110 different countries
- More than 1 400 000 unique visitors!
- More than 27 000 images
- Millions of lines of code
- Thousands of hours of work
- (Internal) in-house technology
- Hundreds of telephone hours
- An incalculable number of discussion/meeting hours on MSN
- Numerous very short nights (especially for me! (Johann ;)))
- Numerous urgent technical operations (moves, repairs, etc...)
- Numerous headaches of all sorts
- Numerous exclusive news posts and images
- Numerous exclusive and innovative services (VOD, etc...)
- Almost a hundred free media files
- 5 Flash introduction animations
- 26 Flash welcome animations
- 5 welcome images!
- ONE BIG FAMILY
- A UNIQUE AND EXPANSIVE PROJECT
- 105 pizzas, 2 561L of coke, 523L of ice-tea/liptonic, 450L of coffee, 3 648 lollies of all kinds
- A team that's always available and merry even at night or on Christmas or New Year's Day! (D-Day...)
- A permanent call into question
- GOOD HUMOUR
- 168 post-its, 168 klinex, 23 rolls of paper towel, 5 reams of paper :-)
- 4 contests, two of which with great prizes for the winners!
- Soon a new version...
- Soon a new fan site...
- Soon many new surprises...
Thanks Johann! | | |
| | | To finish off this special birthday file, I only have a few words to say...
Thank you everyone for these 3 magical years we've spent together...
Thanks to the whole time, without whom the site wouldn't be what it is today, and without whom the adventure wouldn't have been as passionate...
Thanks to all of you visitors, without whom nothing of this would be possible...
...and let the adventure continue!
CyberjujuM
CodeLyoko.fr webmaster for 3 years already, so long as that lasts ;p | | |
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