I wanted to make this site to honor a web page called MewHeart.com that I used to visit often back in the day, as the kids say (early 2000's) It was one of many websites that was a collection of "free to use" images, but this one focused on pixel art from the Pokemon games and anime. The artist had such a unique style that I really loved, and there was so much content on the page like a Draw Oekaki (basically an image/message board, but you were able to draw pictures with your post. Used to be all the rage, I swear) There were even cute in-browser games that utilized some of the icons they drew. It was hours of fun in the early internet days and usually worth a visit to see if the creator had added anything new.
One day I went to find MewHeart.com again and I realized the page was down. I searched around online and confirmed that it had in fact officially gone down. I'm not sure if the creator has another website, so if anyone knows please give me a heads up so maybe I can contact them. For now, just so these images won't be lost to time, I am putting them here for you! If you use these, please credit this page so people can know where the art came from.
I used to use DreamWeaver to make all my websites, but I don't really have a copy of that anymore. I'm giving BlueGriffon a try for now but it's a lil' glitchy. I'm not good at coding from scratch but I can edit code half decently with some help from ol' Google. I sometimes miss the rawness of some of the early pages that used to rule the internet, so I wanted to emulate that style here instead of going full and flashy with how most websites look nowadays (think Wix or Square Space or w/e)
I was able to mass-download a lot of the website when it was still up (probably thinking to do something similar to this idea) then I had to use Wayback Machine (archive.org) in order to scrap together any remaining image files. Unfortunately many of the image URLs don't properly load in, but I got just about all I could from the "free to use" section. There is an English version of MewHeart that wasn't updated as much as the Japanese version (understandable). If only the creator had instant browser translation like we do nowadays, they wouldn't have even had to bother really with an english section. I did try to get some things from both the English and Japanese pages though as I noticed a few differences. I left out some of the Japanese texts for the signs/button section because I feel like uploading a blank version of the image is more useful in the long run.
Yes my child, all things come to an end eventually. However, I believe attempts at preservation are important, otherwise what is the point of having a museum, right? We can learn from the past as well. From my side of things, I make a yearly payment to keep my domain sweetcharm.net in place. Unless I hit financial hardships, it will continue to be paid for until I die in another 60 some years or what have you.
I've already had my web service get sold and all the site contents automatically transferred to another service, so there is a possibility that my host could simply close and this site would be no more. Hopefully they would give me some options to move things off of the server, but you never know! Even if that happens, maybe archive.org would have some snap shots of this site. Perhaps someone else will do the same thing in the future but for this site?