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

Wow, how does it sound - 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 without a name... (1999) (Drakia 1 and 2 are even shameful to call sites, so they are not here.) Primitive, naive, sloppy, unprofessional. All this is true. However, I have more fond memories associated with this site than with all other versions combined. It’s just that it was at that moment that the “golden hour” of my creativity came, when Wing, Shadow, Fighter, Kite with Tikawa and many other dragons were born, who have since become part of me.

Drakia 4, more precisely 'Cosmodrome of the Empire' (2000-2001) The first more or less high-quality embodiment of my author's website. The name 'Drakia' 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 the specified section, and its text has since migrated almost unchanged from version to version.

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

Drakia 7 (2003 - 2004) The seventh version of the site was at that time the most complex project I had done. Drakia 7 turned out to be SO complicated that while working on it I created, almost completed and... rejected the 6th version of the site. 🙂 But the downside of the excessive complexity of Drakia 7 was its impracticality. The site was difficult to navigate and could only be displayed properly on the most powerful computers with 512MB of memory (note from 2010: hehe... :) However, if it weren’t for this version, I would hardly have been able to create Drakia 8, the unsuccessful (but beautiful!) 7th Drakia taught me too much.

Drakia 8 (2004 - 2006) Completely 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 from a programming point of view. Still. (2023 note - heh, heh...) Flash 8th Drakia at that time loaded slowly for many people, and I was SO fed up with complaints and comparisons with Moshkov’s “fast” library (!) that I set myself the goal of creating a flash site that would weigh less and work faster than any text. Just then Ajax appeared, and I used it to the fullest, adding simply crazy (from today’s point of view) optimization of each byte, and manually redrawing almost all the design in vectors. Take a look at the screenshot: beautiful, right? Now hold on: everything you see was crammed into 73kb. In other words, the first page of the 9th Drakia weighed LESS than the screenshot you are looking at! Alas, visually the site turned out to be quite primitive, which forced me to create the 10th Drakia.

Drakia 10 (2010 - 2023) The most beautiful, the most modern, the most advanced, the most sophisticated... (further text 2023) ... at that time the site. The first "Dracia" on a content management system (Joomla 1.5). The site turned out to be so beautiful, convenient and functional that I didn’t touch it for many years, and for the first time I thought about updating it only when mobile phones and tablets began to become more and more part of our lives (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 Drakia, at the time of its appearance, 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 that have passed since the release of Drakia 10, web programming has gone so far forward that any of my attempts to once again present the site as “on the edge of the possible” looked ridiculous compared to the best projects of those years. Now, in essence, "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) brought me back “to shape”, and the result is all 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, because the code, the design, the illustrations, all the covers, and all the content were created by yours truly.

I can’t draw, so all previous versions of the site used more or less suitable ready-made pictures from hundreds of artists. Of course, this didn’t make me too happy, but what can I do? There was simply no way out... And then neural networks appeared.

Yes, all the decoration"Dracii 11"generated by me personally using a neural network"midjourney"and manually drawn/refined/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 completely redesigned by hand, brought them to a clear unified style accepted by publishers, converted them into all formats and generated an offline reader for each book DragonReader, which he himself created based on a Linux project - a library from GitHUB. All old design elements, such as book covers in "dragon library" or screenshots of old versions of Drakia. Overall, the amount of work spent on Drakia 11, significantly surpasses all previous sites combined. This is truly a new stage in my creative life, and therefore -