About The Dark Heaven
After watching the movie of Interview with the Vampire in 1994, I got obsessed with Louis. Reading the Vampire Chronicles later, I found myself deeply falling in love with him and the vampires. I always had day-dreams with them or sometimes even met them in my dreams.
The idea for building this site was due to the movie of Queen of the Damned, though it was very different to the original novel, I still enjoyed watching it very much even the characters portrayed were sucked. I read the original novel, Queen of the Damned afterwards. This was the third of my most favorite Vampire Chronicles novel. In 2002, I decided to write a fanfiction and put it online. And the domain name was chosen to be The Dark Heaven.
In those years, there were many websites related to the Vampire Chronicles which were well-designed with rich content. So, I worked hard on The Dark Heaven, self-learning of website design and coding, enriching the content with movies, novels and the characters. Moreover, I had built another sub-sites, The Vampire Coven, The Vampire Coven Topsites, The Vampire Coven Banner Exchange and The Vampire Coven Online Resource Centre.
But on 25 Dec 2008, unfortunately, The Dark Heaven had been hacked. What a Christmas gift! Without an updated backup, I had spent much time to clean the files. And finally, I decided to do a total revamp, revamping the site not only from the design, but also giving up using iframe and building the site with php.
After one year, in 2009, the revamp on design and basic php had been finished. But I also would like to do content enrichment. The content enrichment was the most time-consuming job. So, I decided to reopen The Dark Heaven first and kept adding new content. The other 3 sub-sites were also resumed except The Vampire Coven Topsites as I could not find a good script.
And in 2015, I switched The Vampire Coven Online Resource Centre from WordPress to Piwigo. But due to the difficulties in script update after years, the site was almost abandoned and would be closed in near future. Perhaps I would include the resource stuff at The Dark Heaven later.
In 2019, I accidentally found out that WordPress was able to do the website building and the result was far from okay. And the script of Phpsiteskin I used to build website was out-dated. So, I started to revamp all my sites again.
And I also decided to close The Vampire Coven Banner Exchange and The Vampire Coven, a formerly the fanlisting of Anne Rice’s Vampires. And the content there would be included at The Dark Heaven. And perhaps I would create other sites related to Anne Rice in future if I could find some nice scripts that could fit.
Surfing the net in recent years, I found many previously well-designed websites related to The Vampire Chronicles had gone offline. What a pity. Therefore, this made me firmly to keep The Dark Heaven alive.
