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Pre-Website History

• January 2002: Purchased the game Star Trek: Armada II, played the game, then began to modify it and in doing so, gaining knowledge of modding Armada ODF, Tech Tree, AIP, and other files.
• May 15, 2004: Joined AFC (Armada Fleet Command) as Elrond. My first few months spent there involved making posts regarding new ways of modifying the Armada II game, and I spent some time in political discussions as well, becoming known as a voice of reason in the community (insert missing modesty here).
• February 11, 2005: The very page you are viewing right now was published on this date as Elrond's Star Trek Haven although the name was totally gay by today's standards.
• March 17, 2005: Became a staff member at A2files (Filefront). Didn't last long there as I began to lose interest in modding Armada II not long after.
• April 14, 2005: Became an administrator at AFC. I had a new interest in modding Armada at this time, and so I pushed my own mod forward, Supercivilizations Mod. At around this time I found out how to replace the stock Armada II shields with shields constructed from sprites instead of a model. This shield method would be used in many many Armada I and II mods in the near and far future.

Early Website History

• July 6, 2005: In a spectacular "let's create a whole bunch of forums split from the main community" extravaganza, I became one of the few Armada II modders to create my own site. At this time, it was all about the free forums. Another member called 'Majestic' would make his own community called Majestic's Downloads which would one day become known as 'Majestic Sci-Fi Central'. My new community would be called 'The Universal Armageddon Modding Team Forums' or 'UAMTF' for short. Its present location and name: Ye Olde Phoenix Galactic Alliance.
• Late July 2005: UAMTF renamed to Phoenix Fleet Command, a dreadful name that seemed too much like a ripoff of Armada Fleet Command. It was immediately changed.
• August 31, 2005: The first official and long-standing name of an up and coming network, Phoenix Galactic Alliance, would be dedicated on this day.
• September 1, 2005: The Universal Conquerors or Xillirian race would be completed for the Universal Armageddon Mod.
• Late September 2005: The Universal Armageddon Mod would be put on hold and later canceled as the interest of the modders involved, including that of myself, declined to the point that I didn't even play Armada 2 anymore.

Moving Away from the Free Forums

• October 31, 2005: The beginning of a great adventure - great in many ways. There would be more bad times than good times ahead for this network, which once was located at www.phoenixgalacticalliance.com. The early website was very much lacking in terms of web design, and the color scheme was just horrid. As good as I once was at modding Armada II, I had a long way to go with web design. At this time in history, I had absolutely no knowledge of PHP and little knowledge of HTML, and at this time, the initial website really displayed this lacking of knowledge.
• February 2006: As all interest in gaming at this time had gone toward the game The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth and my girlfriend who I had reunited with in April of 2005, I had a little more time to learn PHP and HTML. With this, I used my time to learn those skills and expanded greatly from almost no knowledge just a few months before..
• March to October 2006: With my knowledge in web design expanding at an ever-increasing pace, I eventually delved into XHTML and CSS. These new tools would make it much easier for me to make Phoenix Galactic Alliance into a site that actually looked a lot better than it initially did.

Web Design as the 'New' Modding

• December 2006 - January 2007: The greatest extent of activity in the Phoenix Galactic Alliance network in our history. This time would also be the time that I would gain more experience with file management at a new job. After my temporary assignments were completed, I would expand the network to XHTML 1.0 Strict, which is, as the name would imply, the strictest brand of normal XHTML. The site would receive many modifications; however, these modifications would only be the tip of the iceberg compared to what would happen later in 2007.
• November 2007: Instead of using MKPortal, which was a good portal tool but filled with much HTML elements and attributes that were outdated, I converted to TinyPortal for my SMF Forum. This would make the site more complete and although the site would have no official gallery that automatically made thumbnails from uploaded images, the advancements it would gain were necessary. TinyPortal included an articles system that allows high-level administrators the ability to use PHP in their code, and a new downloads module. Throughout this month, the CSS for the network would also be standardized, though minification was needed if the site was going to have better performance.
• February 10, 2008: Phoenix Galactic Alliance would be renamed to Altair Tech and Gaming and many new theme changes would follow, including a database-stored style sheet system that only loaded style sheet components necessary for each page. In addition, the domain would be changed to www.altairtechandgaming.com. The staff and members present at the time agreed that this name change was indeed necessary to reflect the purpose of this network, as the purpose became less about Science Fiction and gaming and more about general community tech support, web design, and random chat between friends who had common goals.
• March 2008 - Present: Through many bouts of low activity along with some unsavory characters coming and going (mostly gaming clan members involved in RPGs on the network), the style sheets of the themes on the site would be even further standardized and many unnecessary components were eliminated whilst more useful components were being added. The site's performance was upgraded in Janurary 2009 as a response to results from Firefox's YSlow addon. The site's performance was boosted from 50% to 89% overall. In addition, by this time, every single page on the network has valid XHTML, CSS, and Javascript. It is also during this period of time that jQuery began to be used to make the site much more interactive. Now the direction the network is heading is that of being able to retrieve forum data, submit forms, and do almost everything from the front page without having to reload the page - another performance enhancement that will reduce HTTP Requests greatly.