-- about this site --

'Sons of Minas Tirith' was established on the 1st of November 2002. It was then partly hosted on the t-online.de server and by the free hosting service at bravenet. After a while I moved all of the site over to bravenet but quickly got tired of ads and stupid bandwidth issues and after countless hours spent searching for a better host I finally decided that the best solution would be to buy a domain and get rid of all the troubles once and for all. I got my domain minas-ithil.net in January of 2003 and have had no reason to complain since... :)

- past layouts -

*Sigh* I wish I had screenshots of all the previous layouts but I only have one of version 3.0 so descriptions of the versions 1.0 and 2.0 will have to do.

Version 1.0 - S.o.M.T.'s first layout was pretty crappy and featured some random pics of Boromir, Faramir and Sean Bean as well as a quote from the 'Lament for Gandalf' from the FotR soundtrack:

I reniad lín ne mór nuithannen
In gwidh ristennin, i fae narchannen

(Your journey has ended in darkness,
The bonds cut, the spirit broken)

Version 2.0 - Version 2.0 of this site featured some more Boromir and Faramir pics and my first try at using real html and frames. I liked that layout a lot and it was up for quite a long time (which was also due to my lack of time to make a new one) so I guess every single person who has ever visited this site knows it and probaby got sick of it after a while... Sorry... :P Well, it had a lot of disadvantages so I decided to go with something simpler and that's how Version 3.0 came to be, the only layout I actually have a screenshot of.

Version 3.0

I had this layout on my hard drive for quite some time before actually uploading it because I wasn't sure if it wasn't too sad or too dark or too whatever. I even made an alternative version that had kind of an orange/amber colour scheme but in the end I decided I liked this one better after all... This layout was also my first try at using CSS.

Version 3.0 of S.o.M.T. featured pictures from the Special Extended
Edition of 'The Two Towers' (taken from the EE preview on the theatrical version DVD released in August).
The lyrics used in the layout were from Loreena McKennit's beautiful song 'Dante's Prayer':

Cast your eyes to the ocean, cast your soul to the sea.
When the dark night seems endless, please remember me...


The current layout features pictures of Boromir, Faramir, Denethor, Minas Tirith and the banner of Gondor from the TTT EE and RotK as well as quotes from the song And the there was Silence by Blind Guardian and from Tolkien's wonderful Lament for Boromir.
Graphics were made in Photoshop Elements (I finally found the time to figure out how the program works and I LOVE it...) and the site was created (and I know that that's a little like cheating but I still prefer a nice-looking site made this way to a crappy hand-coded one) using Microsoft Publisher. I only added some finishing touches in Notepad. But the next layout WILL be handcoded... I promise... ;)

While version 3.0 was also one using Microsoft Publisher the first two versions were made partly (Version 2.0) or completely (Version 1.0) in Netscape Composer which made them extra crappy... I have long since given up on using Netscape to create complex sites (that is sites consisting of more than just one picture and one line of text) because html doesn't seem to be working properly with it and neither does CSS.

I guess that's enough ranting on my part. I'd love to get some comments about the site, the layout or whatever you have to say in my guestbook. And if you ever think you have something that belongs on this site but isn't there (like pictures, info etc.) feel free to e-