The first website

The beginning. A prototype went up in the middle of October 2025 and was built out over four days into the shape the site still broadly has: a home page, About, Community, Contact, Donations, Browse and a Leaderboard, with terms and privacy pages alongside them.

It was static — every page rendered content written into the page rather than read from anything — and the work was mostly layout, responsiveness and getting content to sit in the centre of the screen rather than against its left edge.

The first attempt at search visibility happened here too, prompted by the site not appearing in Google at all. Most of what was added in that pass has since been replaced by the SEO layer built in August 2026, but this is where the concern started.

None of this had a database behind it. Every note, every contributor and every number on the leaderboard was written into the page by hand, which is worth stating because it explains a great deal about what came later — the invented statistics that had to be removed in August 2026 began life here, as placeholder content in a prototype that nobody remembered to replace once real data arrived.

The domain was settled in this period too, and with it the decision that the product would be named for what it is meant to do rather than for what it holds. Everything since has been built on top of these four days, and although almost none of the original code survives, the shape of the site — what pages exist and what each is for — is still recognisably this.