This site has roots back to 2008, although at that time it was called Shibuya Daze, in honor of our favorite ward of Tokyo. As you may or may not know, I have a love of traveling but most importantly a love of Asia. While that is part of what prompted the initial travels to Japan and the Philippines, I have since come to realize that I am happier traveling than at home and thus I will be a vagabond for life.
It all began, as most good things do, one drunken evening while BBQ'ing with some friends, in what would otherwise have been a perfectly ordinary night. Looking back, no one can swear who suggested it first, but I swear to you -- no, seriously, I'm not kidding -- that it was me. Our month-long trip to Tokyo, complete with a last-minute addition of a week in the Philippines, was less than two weeks away and I still had not decided how I wanted to share our daily pics / vids / stories with my friends back home.
First thing I had planned to do off the plane was purchase a super bad-ass camera with the most megapixels that I could find. Trust me, I planned on taking thousands upon thousands of pictures, and did not want to be hassling with memory sticks or having to post them all on Facebook. And then it hit me: why not just create my own web site, completely filled with anything and everything relevant to the trip...? I could post all the pictures, stories, even videos I wanted and no one could tell me otherwise or even complain of content or anything!
And there it was. As a group we all started pondering names, and this one I will admit I do remember it being Jared who thought up SHIBUYA DAZE. And I have to say it is fucking perfect. The next morning, still slightly drunk, I purchased the domain name ShibuyaDaze.com as I was getting ready for work. And thus the site was born.
After a quick week I had slapped together a basic layout, using nothing but Notepad and Paint (yep, that's right, back then I still worked old school). And it turned out surprisingly good, as a matter of fact. The design was simple yet stylish, and with some nice JavaScript to give it a little life, it was perfect for our first trip. That is a screenshot of the old layout to the right, Shibuya Dave v1.0. Nothing fancy, but it got the job done.
Beginning once we returned to the States, I began to crave a new layout, one a little more fancy. Making use of my Christmas vacation, I commenced work on a new layout, Shibuya Daze v2.0 -- pictured below. I incorporated that one picture of Tokyo that I love so much into the template and expanded it by creating a few new sections. I also upgraded and got the newest version of Adobe Photoshop, although I still did all the HTML and JavaScript with nothing but notepad. Only problem was by this point is was becoming obvious that I was going to be the one doing all the work on this site, as Jared is not fluent in scripting (he likes Tumblr, where all the work is done for him).
It is still a work in progress -- this site always will be -- but let me know what you think or if you come across any issues, like missing images or pages. Below are the final evolutions of Shibuya Daze, leading up to HoliDaze. Pictured below is v3.0, which was the first one done completely in PHP and with a fully integrated blog, versus previously having our blog hosted on a third-party site. At the same time I created a different section in Shibuya Daze for each country, with each one having a different sub-domain: i.e. Costa Rican Daze (costa.shibuyadaze.com), Filipino Daze (phils.shibuyadaze.com), etc. On plus side was that we could easily make radically different layouts for each country, but the downside was all the separate databases made the tags and searching not quite as effective. Anyway, enough talking, enjoy the screenshots and relive the past!
