Official Orange: Retro

Okay, to start things off, this will be an ongoing blog with things being added as they go out of style. This is kind of the illustrated story of OO past, as told by Elijah and Jeff. So, let's start from the beginning.

Part 1: The Xanga Site - Elijah

From the beginning of time, I have been funny. That will never change. During school one afternoon, someone suggested that I start writing a funny blog. I put it off for a while, and then one night decided the time had come. Well? What's the first website that comes to mind when you think "blog"? For me, it was Xanga. And thus, the original site was created. You may remember the url: http://www.xanga.com/notsolonelyboy15/ Notice, I didn't hyperlink that. That's because the site doesn't exist anymore. But, more on that later. Many people ask why I used that username. Notsolonelyboy15 was an ode to lonelygirl15. She made it big on the internet, and I hoped by honoring her, I would too. True story. The day I began the site was February 28th, 2008. Now, Xanga allows you to have a picture for your website, kind of like Facebook has a profile picture. Well, that was the first thing I was interested in doing. I wanted to design the "logo" per say. So, I went through the pictures I had of me on my computer. At this point, I came across the picture at the right.

One winter afternoon (an ice storm had hit, so we had no school), I went outside and saw that the basketball net was frozen solid. Well, I did what anyone would do, and HIT IT WITH A BASEBALL BAT! As the ice went everywhere, Liam took a picture. Long story short, I cobbed around just me, since the picture turned out quite well. Then, I grayscaled it. At that point, I searched "random" on Google images, and then cobbed a ton of other random pictures. Jeff was out of the picture during this time, so I just went with the name "Elijah Kampsen." You know? Because that's my name? And I added some graph paper. I don't remember what significance the graph paper had, but still. And thus, I uploaded what was the first ever OO logo (left).

Then, I wrote the first ever blog. There was a "required" introduction entry that I had to write, but after that came what still is my favorite blog to date: Leap Day. Ahhh...good times. There you go, if you've ever wondered what my favorite blog I've ever written was, Leap Day is it. During the days after that, I continued writing the blog. You may remember, the blog then was a lot longer everyday. It was just text blogs. Go look at ONE blog now, and then multiply that by 5 to see what a Xanga post looked like. I have no idea where I was pulling all that from. Now I have trouble finding one subject a day, when I used to have five subjects a day. While I wrote, we were testing different internets. We had dial-up for a year, and we were SICK of it, so we began experimenting with other forms of internet (i.e. cell card). This wasn't going well, and one night, our internet went totally out, and the people at our ISP expected a several day wait. So, I turned to Jeff.

Part 2: Jeff Comes Into The Picture - Jeff

Before we continue, let me fill you in on my side of the story before Elijah's internet failed. So, I wasn't the best of friends with Elijah. I mean, we were friends, just not best friends. I knew him from band (drum line, more specifically) and we had gotten to know each other, but we were definitely not as close as we are today. So, I heard that Elijah had started his own blog. I knew how funny he was in school, and was anxious to see this new blog of his. I read the first entry of his and I thought it was great! Every day when I got home from school, I couldn't wait to read the next entry! One thing I couldn't believe was how much he wrote each day! To think of all those topics and write about it; it's hard! I would know! That's exactly why he asked for help. Elijah encouraged his readers to send in our own entries that he would include in his blog. It was around this time that he also named the blog Official Orange and came up with a new logo (shown right). Allowing people to send in their own entries would let some of the load off his back and allow others to express themselves on his blog. Well, when he asked for entries, I was very interested. I had a few ideas of my own and was anxious to send it in. When I sent in my first blog, Elijah loved it and put it onto the blog. Over the next few days, I sent in a couple more. Then, Elijah's internet went out...

When this happened, Elijah called me and asked me to write the blog for a couple days. I was shocked! He actually asked me to write the blog! That meant I had to come up with about five funny topics and write about them to make this blog! Fortunately, I had many ideas in my head. Over these couple days, I wrote about things like chocolate muffins, white-out, plastic forks and spoons, annoying gum chewers, easy buttons, and more! I loved updating this blog! Then, Elijah's internet came back up and he thanked me for my work. Because I had done so well and Elijah needed the help, we decided to team up and write this blog together!

Things seemed great at the new Official Orange! We now had two different writers who would trade off days and things never looked better! We thought we had it going now and nothing would stop it! But alas, of course something had to happen, because when do things always go right? And it wasn't long after we joined up that misfortune would strike and the blog's existence was at stake...

Part 3: The Incident - Elijah

During an average English hour at school, things could get pretty boring. So boring, in fact, that a friend of mine fell asleep during class. This sparked a blog idea for me, so I figured I'd snap a picture with my cell phone of him to accompany the blog. That night, I went home and began to update the blog as usual, including the picture and blog I'd thought of earlier that day. Little did I know, this one portion of one update would put the whole blog at stake. Later that week, I was called to the principal's office at school. I received a detention and was asked to remove the picture from the blog, as it is against school rules to use cell phones/take pictures during class (which I knew prior to taking the picture). My parents were also contacted, who asked that I remove the epic amounts of profane language that had added up through the weeks. At this point, I was pretty freaked out, so I quickly copied and pasted all the blogs into MS word and shut down the Xanga site.

Jeff and I couldn't let such a small incident kill the entire blog, so we got to thinking. Jeff had an old domain name he had purchased for a previous project that was never finished, and he said we could use that as home for a new, more updated blog. So, as the days went by, Jeff began work on building the new site, and I began the time-consuming task of revising all the blogs to make them reader-friendly. All of this work going into the new site made us want to renovate a lot of stuff, specifically a new logo to commemorate our partnership. So, one day, while at his house, we decided we'd take a picture for the logo:

As we uploaded the picture, we made some necessary changes and found a new font for the logo. This all came together as the logo you know today:

After weeks of work, it was finally time to launch the new site, and boy, were we excited!

Part 4: The New Site is Launched

Keep checking the home page for updates to this SPECIAL blog.