My very first website consisted of a single page that described the hardware required to view it :)

Wow, that sounds like... Home Server 98! And there were 97 and 96, but I won’t show them to anyone 🙂 Actually, this site was pulled out of oblivion for only one reason: it was then, in 97-98, that I wrote the first version “Wrath of the Dragon"and, so to speak, became a writer ...

“Drakia 3”, still untitled… (1999) (Drakia 1 and 2 are even shameful to call sites, so they are not here.) Primitive, naive, sloppy, unprofessional. All this is so. However, I have more fond memories of this site than all the other versions combined. It was just at that moment that the 'golden hour' of my creativity fell, when Wing, Shadow, Fighter, Kite with Tikava and many other dragons were born, which have since become a part of me.

Drakia 4, more precisely 'Cosmodrome of the Empire' (2000-2001) The first more or less high-quality incarnation of my author's site. The name 'Dracia' itself came only in the next version, but this site is notable for the first appearance of a separate section 'dragons'. I wrote a real encyclopedia for this section, and since then the text has been wandering from version to version almost unchanged.

Drakia 5 (2001 - 2003) Perhaps the most successful version of the site (not counting the 10th), and one of the most beautiful. Unfortunately, Drakia 5 was not very browser compatible, and it was not possible to change this because the 90% code was written in DHTML, which each browser had its own idea of. However, this site was the first 'serious' project after the primitive home pages, and many of the design elements created for it have migrated almost unchanged to Drakia 7.

Drakia 7 (2003 – 2004) The seventh version of the site was at that time the most complex project that I did. 'Dracia 7' turned out to be SO complicated that in the process of working on it, I created, almost completed and ... rejected the 6th version of the site. 🙂 But the flip side of the excessive complexity of 'Dracia 7' was its impracticality. The site was inconvenient to navigate, and could only be displayed normally on the most powerful computers with 512 MB of memory (2010 note: hehe ... 🙂 ). However, without this version, I would hardly have been able to create 'Dracia 8', the unsuccessful (but beautiful!) 7th Dracia taught me too much.

Drakia 8 (2004 – 2006) Entirely created in Flash. Not the most beautiful, not the most convenient, but the most successful version of the site: the 8th Drakia won the prize “Best Flash Site 2004” from the Union of Webmasters of Russia! Such a big, weighty diploma 🙂

Drakia 9 (2006 – 2010) My most difficult project in terms of programming. Still. (note from 2023 – heh heh…) Flash 8th Drakia at that time loaded slowly for many, and I was SO fed up with complaints and comparisons with the “fast” Moshkov library (!) that I set myself the goal of creating a flash site that would weigh less and work faster than any text. That's when Ajax came along, and I used it to its fullest, adding just crazy (from today's point of view) optimization of each byte, and manually redrawing almost all the decoration in vectors. Take a look at the screenshot: beautiful, right? Now hold on, everything you see has been crammed into 73kb. In other words, the first page of Drakia 9 was LESS than the screenshot you are looking at! Alas, visually the site turned out to be rather primitive, which made me create the 10th Drakia.

Drakia 10 (2010 – 2023) The most beautiful, the most modern, the most advanced, the most fancy… (further text 2023) ... at that time the site. The first "Dracia" on the content management system (Joomla 1.5). The site turned out to be so beautiful, convenient and functional that I did not touch it for many years, and for the first time I thought about updating it only when mobile phones and tablets began to enter our lives more and more (“Drakia 9” worked very poorly on mobile devices) .

And that's when it became clear that I had fallen into a trap. Each version of Dracia, at the time of its release, used the latest, most modern technologies, squeezing all the juice out of the computers with which they tried to watch it 🙂 But in the years since the release of Dracia 10, web programming has gone so far forward that any of my attempts to re-issue the site “on the verge of possibility” looked ridiculous against the backdrop of the best projects of those years. Now, essentially,make a website"not much different from"make an advanced computer game with 3D animation, interface on BootStrap using at least React.js and LESS" etc. In general, I could no longer keep up with the progress and abandoned the site for ... 13 years.

However, in recent years, my work and, especially, a sharp increase in creativity and motivation (due to the drones with which I now traveled through the mountains and ancient ruins) have returned me “in shape”, and the result is around you - see for yourself 🙂

Drakia 11 (2022 - 2023). The site you are currently viewing. This version of "Dracia" is unique for many reasons, but, first and foremost, it is the fact that here is the code, and design, and illustrations, and all the covers, and all the content - created by your obedient servant.

I can't draw, so all previous versions of the site used more or less suitable ready-made pictures by hundreds of artists. Of course, this did not please me too much, but what can you do? There was simply no way out ... And then neural networks appeared.

Yes, all decorationDracii 11” generated by me personally using a neural network “midjourney” and manually completed / finalized / improved. From now on, there is not a single “foreign” image on the site (except for the official covers of my books ordered by the publisher). All 95 works that I wrote - 445 files - I manually completely re-arranged, brought to a clear unified style adopted by publishers, converted to all formats and generated an offline reader for each book DragonReader, which he himself created on the basis of the Linux project - libraries from GitHUB. All the old design elements were also processed by neural networks, such as book covers in “dragon library” or screenshots of old versions of Drakia. In general, the amount of work spent on Drakia 11, significantly surpasses all previous sites combined. This is really a new stage in my creative life, and therefore -