The E Club has gone through two transitions since its creation: the move from its original home on the ill-fated Moogo website builder to WebStarts, and the move from WebStarts to website host FastComet. While the first transition was out of necessity - Moogo would have shut The E Club down due to changes to its business model had I not moved the site - the second was due to profound advances in The E Club's technologies that a drag-and-drop website builder could no longer keep up with. A powerful responsive design, greater client-side interactivity, a robust blog backed by WordPress, a more optimal page structure paired with speed and search engine optimizations, and more made The E Club 3.0, launched in 2016, the best version of The E Club yet and provided tighter end-to-end control over the site and the technologies supporting it. Recently, it started becoming clear that The E Club…
The E Club has evolved since its creation in 2009, but its design stayed more-or-less the same: a large banner (sometimes animated) at the top of the page, the menu and content below that, and the footer. That layout worked for the older versions of The E Club - the content didn't take up the whole width of the page since the site was only optimized for bigger screens, and there was lots of space to display images in the background and at the top of the page. When The E Club 3.0 went live, The E Club was rebuilt from the ground up to be faster, simpler, more secure, and most notably, more responsive. The design of The E Club 2.0 was mostly intact, but it clashed with The E Club's new responsiveness in that the top bar banner wasn't well-optimized for larger displays (there was a bunch of whitespace around it), and there was a disconnect between the desktop and smartphone versions (the…
Back in 2010 when The E Club had just moved from Moogo to WebStarts, I touted a new security feature that I called The E Club Secure: right-clicks were disabled, so no one could copy information from the site. But due to the lack of necessity for the feature, The E Club Secure was quietly phased out upon The E Club 3.0's rollout. Today, The E Club Secure takes on a new form: The E Club now serves its visitors with cutting-edge TLS 1.2 encryption. In other words, The E Club 3.0 is now HTTPS by default on all modern browsers. Though some older browsers (such as IE8 and below on Windows XP and dated Android browsers) don't support this new feature, visitors from those browsers will fall back to the original HTTP version of the site and can easily view the secure version from a modern browser. So now, visitors can enjoy The E Club more safely and securely than ever before. (Though we're…
Today, August 11, 2016, is not an ordinary day in the life of The E Club. While it may seem so on the surface, an incredibly important torch was just passed: The E Club 2.0, hosted by WebStarts, has closed down, leaving The E Club 3.0 (what you're on right now) as the one true flagship of The E Club Family. The E Club 2.0 was created with WebStarts on September 17, 2010 to replace its own predecessor, The E Club 1.0, hosted on Moogo. WebStarts caught my eye because of its unique drag-and-drop editor; at the time, I had little knowledge of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, so I had to rely on such a website builder to maintain the site. For quite some time, WebStarts was a great opportunity for The E Club to grow - with its flexible editor, a domain name, more disk space, and a variety of built-in features, I was able to expand The E Club and begin to unify The E Club Family, starting with the…
I am E, founder and CEO of The E Club Family, and this is my personal blog on The E Club! For information pertaining to The E Club Family as a whole as well as more Mario, Star Trek, and science information, check out The E Club World. You are here at a very special time in The E Club's history; the site you are now on is the result of seven years of devotion to bringing the best Mario, Star Trek, and science information to the web in addition to incredible technological advancements. But before I get to that, here's how we got to today.
The E Club was originally founded on June 8, 2009 with a now-defunct website creator called Moogo; though it looked far different than it does today, that version of The E Club and today's version share the same purpose: being my personal site about Mario, Star Trek, and science. Over the next year or so, I continued to expand The E Club's content, even…