rain and sky

Domain Name

The domain rainandsky.net was registered on 29 March 2008 at Holdfire. It is currently hosted on the Beta Reseller plan at Holdfire.

I chose the name rain and sky because it popped into my head at 3 am when I was trying to think of a better name than “mari diary”¹. Rain is one of my favorite things. Multiple posts about it on my previous domain and a recurring rain layout at Misstuned are just a little proof. As for sky, well, not only does rain fall from the sky², but I think it’s very pretty. It’s my favorite thing to take pictures of³, because it’s always changing and always pretty.⁴

A good indication of longevity for this name is that it’s in English. I have a tendency to pick Japanese domain names⁵. No matter what I call myself or what language I type in, I’ll always feel comfortable with “rain and sky”.

Current Design

The current design is called いつかのSummer, after the song by 相場雅紀 of 嵐. It was inspired by growing dislike of the retina-burning qualities of the previous theme, and the finding of colourlovers. I proceeded to try out a few other patterns, but the blue and orange “paisleyfish” by jimmyjames caught my attention. I proceeded to click on the color palette it was based on, Giant Goldfish by manekineko, and proceeded to use that in editing my last design, ☆COLORFUL☆, until I had this. Somewhere along the line, I was reminded of and started to sing いつかのSummer, so that’s what I named the design. The blue and orange gives me that hot and cold feeling that I associate with summer. It’s real hot outside, but you can cool off with a lovely crystal glass, dripping down the sides with condensation, full of slightly sweet, tangy, sour lemonade…

You know what it reminds me of now?

Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes

I suppose I’ll have to call it “いつかのSummer: Marmalade Skies” now. Maybe my next theme for Mt should be a remix more geared toward the song…

This design has been up since 10 May 2008.

Previous Designs

Fourth Design: ☆COLORFUL☆

The fourth design was called ☆COLORFUL☆, and was modeled after my petitmall blog’s design (which I edited from the original “simple2_09″ design on my petitmail blog). I picked the colors in Color Schemer Studio and the leaves are still the same pixeled ones from the last design⁶ . I wanted to change the colors up and have something fun and bright, and voici!

This design was up from 1 May 2008 until 9 May 2008.

Third Design: ☆太陽が輝き-sun shines-☆

The third overall, design was called . It was inspired by severe discontent with the previous design and finding the awesome stock photo at Tammi’s site⁷

I basically took the previous theme and stripped the background and the colors out. I then picked a strong shades of blue and green, and worked from those to find a generally-suitable set of link colors. Then, I realized the header looked a bit dull, so I edited the saturation and hue until I was pleased with the results.

If you’re curious, I pixeled the tiny little leaves used to mark lists in the sidebar myself.

This design was up from 17 April 2008 until 1 May 2008.

Second Design: ☆the morning after the rain☆

The second design is called ☆the morning after the rain☆, and it is based on my “Ah…まだ止まない雨” design that is currently (as of 1 May 2008) up at Misstuned.

My inspiration were the typical cute Japanese-styled designs you find at sushi-cat.net and kuuchuu.net. I went surfing and found some of my favorite sozai sites again, and started to work with stuff from them, but got sick of not having my own background images and buttons, so I drew the background raindrops and list images. I then got too lazy to draw a header image, so I photoshopped a picture I took in September 2007⁸ and slapped some text on it. It was made entirely too quickly, so I’m feeling unconfident about it already. LOL THIS DESIGN WAS UP FOR THREE DAYS, 14 April 2008-17 April 2008.

First Design: WordPress Default

The first, and only previous design which was up for about two weeks, until 14 April 2008, was the default WordPress theme, by Michael Heilemann. All I had done to it was change the content of the right column and the colors in the top image.

Idiocy Explained:

1. which was my previous personal domain [↩]
2. Ahhh! Water is falling from the sky. XD LOL, thank you Captain Obvious!Mari. [↩]
3. But they’re not very good, thank you Mr. Cheapo Wal-Mart!Camera. [↩]
4. I guess that makes me a pretty good space cadet. [↩]
5. My first domain was “ohayou-morning.net”. Sometimes my Eihongo domain names seem stupid once I’ve had them for too long [↩]
6. I pixeled them! [↩]
7. Owned by Tammi. She’s an awesome hostee of Misstuned! [↩]
8. With my bad camera - which is the only reason I photoshopped it. The colors that I remember weren’t even close to what showed in the photo. [↩]