About Me

So my name is Jacque (pronounced Jackie), though most of my online friends refer to me as Shadow (because I pwn at original names). I'm a junior in high school, and because I like to think that I'm above the average intelligence, I spend quite a bit of time working to achieve the International Baccalaureate diploma that is supposedly so awesome. Not sure what I'll do after high school. I have an intense interest in music, but my passion falls into History (patriotic as always, U.S. history intrigues me the most). Like my father, I've learned to program, and I consider myself, and have been told, that I'm one of the better ones out there. I built this website from scratch, and have continued to build off it to make other sweet things (like a custom forum).

Offline, my life can be summed up pretty quickly. My parents divorced while I was in elementary school; currently I live with my father and two brothers and see my mother on my school vacations. I am a band geek, having played clarinet for almost six years and various types of saxophones for three years. During the summer and fall my life is consumed by marching band, which is honestly an amazing activity. It's a lot of hard work, but after you perform a good show, the feeling you get is amazing. While it does suck having your Saturdays completely taken away from you, the rewards for it are more than worth the sacrifice. So other than music, my school life could be called what is average. I have a boyfriend, Michael, who I love with all of my heart. I also have a great group of friends who are the best to just go mess around with. Nothing better than Rock Band and Chinese Food.

About TSR

History

www.theshadowsrealm.com started out of my love of wolves. The name came from a story that I had written, about a pack of wolves who was led by a wolf named Shadow. The website was a tribute to this pack. Around the same time, I began to watch the movie Balto...obsessively. I created another portion of the website as a tribute to the movie and the sled dog I loved so much.

As I grew older and took my website ownership more seriously, I removed the Balto information from the website, deciding to move on. I became more interested in graphic design and coding, and began remodeling my website so that it could focus on my pack of wolves. Eventually, I did away with the wolf content all together, but I still make layouts highlighting my favorite animal.

Since I removed the original content from the website, I've turned TSR into my personal blog and portfolio. With each new revision, the coding of the website gets more advanced and generally the layouts get better.

Behind the Scenes

I take pride in putting a lot of hard work into my website, whether it's on the main page or one of my mini-projects behind scenes. So I thought I'd take some time to give people an insight to how TSR is powered.

Unlike most blogs out there, TSR is not powered by Cutenews or Wordpress, or any other download CMS. It is also not run by me logging into Dreamweaver every two minutes to make a post. Rather, it is run by a custom CMS, created and coded almost entirely by me, with the basic backbone created by my father. Essentially, how almost of the site is coded is by echoing out the data from a database, which is entered and edited by me from my nifty control panel. That's fairly basic stuff with my blog and with my portfolio, but for the rest of the content pages; it gets more complex. By echoing out a defined variable from the database, I can echo out any custom page I wish.

I use Wordpress on some of my other sites where it was simply easier to set that up than to set up my own CMS, however, I would encourage everybody on the web to gradually separate themselves from the downloaded CMS's and work to create their own. What you're able to do with it is simply amazing, and you'll find that your knowledge grows so much faster and greater when you're doing the work rather than installing plugins.