Back to Homepage
Well here we are and here I am at the end of a quick yet productive and challenging summer. The first thing you should know about this website is that it is an ongoing labor of love. Last spring in university, I completed a course is web design tools. This was one of my required classes for my Management Information Systems (MIS) degree. Unfortunately the course wasn't long enough. This HTML/CSS/JavaScript instruction enjoyable that I took it upon myself to continue the instruction through the summer. A majority of this instruction mostly came from tutorial videos from Youtube and just small hints I pulled off of Google searches. For me, this project made this summer be the quickest summer ever.
The beginning of this project was initially abandoned then picked up after nearly 11 years. It all started in summer of 2004. After constantly reading episode guides off of sites like "TVTome" and other fan-generated sites, I decided to do my own episode guides. Somehow I chose "My Life as a Teenage Robot." I started this project using a computer running Windows 98, no internet connection, and the information was entered using Word 97. What a job it was! Before the days of streaming as we know it, I had to do the guides for memory. I had most, not all, of season 1 on tape. I watched a lot of selected episodes and I memorized much of the lines. It would be more difficult for the eps I didn't care much about. As I remember, things went fairly well and smoothly. However, knowing the computer and it's problems, I feared that the more information that goes in the Word document, the bigger the file size, not knowing about computer memory back then, I just completely aborted the project out of fear of crashing the computer beyond repair. The file was deleted and never seen again. Year later, it was a move I now regret. I would have like to have seen the original project.
Fast-forward to spring 2015, I took a web design tools class and really enjoyed it. Since I didn't have any real plans for the summer and I had to go back to my aunt and uncle's (my) home to help take care of my cat, I figured this could be some project for the summer. What I would do my website about, I didn't know. I figured it would consist of the things I've learned and possibly more. One night, shortly after the semester ended, I'm in the other room and I hear a song play. This song was alluded in one of the season 1 episodes that I also mentioned in the old episode guide. That made me feel guilty for completely abandoning the old episode guide. Now that I'm older and more diciplined, it sounded like a project I could do in these recent times, especially now that there is Youtube and the entire "MLAATR" series is on HuluPlus, there can be more accuracy. Then it came to me, why don't I spend the summer rewriting the episode guide from scratch...in website format? This project began with the snap of my fingers. Soon after, I wake my laptop from sleep mode, plug in a USB stick, and created the HTML necessary files. It all went on from there.
The thing is, this was a one-person project. Not only did I put the coding in the HTML/CSS files using Notepad++ (I used Dreamweaver at school), but I also had to study each episode. Thanks to HuluPlus, I could watch every episode and summarize each episode with accuracy without pulling out my old, aging tapes from the closet. Some of these recordings are from the original airings. For quote accuracy, I used the zoomed-in episodes on YouTube. It was quicker and I didn't have to log in. They were lower quality, but they were sufficient. This whole process took about 2 months to complete. Then I had to do the formatting. This is where CSS came in. Some pictures on this site, like the logo, I customized using Microsoft Paint (I'm too poor for Photoshop).
You may or may not have read that I was not paid to make this website. This site was studiously made with much dicipline and determination needed for a potential future career in web design. Through the summer, I would feel like nothing without this project. Even though I do have a personal life, it was (and still is) my world.
Will I do seasons 2 and 3? All I need is the time and the episodes. After a break of a few months (perhaps even a year or so) that's when I could start back up. I most certainly would do all the episodes.
Sometime in fall 2004 (from what I remember), someone made an MLAATR fansite by the name of "Jenny Wakeman." It had an episode guide and a whole bunch of great pictures captured from the show. Unfortunately, the site owner couldn't keep up with the site then the site stayed inactive. It all disapeared when Geocities (the site's host) shut down. Years later I decided to do my own site, this site, but in my own style. I was hoping to make it similar to that old site. I don't remember much about it as it has been so long. I believe I have the background color correct (or maybe it was darker). The old "Jenny Wakeman" fansite, and other MLAATR fansites, may be long dead, but "Jenny Wakeman Lives!"
Back to Homepage