Once upon the year of 2003, there was a girl named Diane. Diane was really bored in those days, and had only just begun learning web design. Her enthusiasm for the subject increased and slowly her skills and love for website-making grew.Suddenly, in the beginning of February, Diane found herself overly obsessed with a British comedian by the name of Eric Idle. She began researching him like crazy on the world wide web, but sadly, found little to satisfy her cravings for more Eric information, pictures, and entertainment in general. The few sites that featured this Mr. Idle were lame, small, and not to mention, closed forever. It was rather disappointing.But then, she had an idea! "Well," she said to herself, "I'll just have to create the perfect Eric website myself, then." And so she did. On February 10th, on a small server called Expage, the website was born, and she named it Idleized Heaven.It was anything but perfect. In all actuality, it was rather horrid in the beginning. It had an eye-hurting, multi-colored layout and featured a rather poorly-written biography, a guestbook and chatroom, a small collection of photos taken from other sites with permission, and some random info. The site received few visitors, despite Diane's attempts to get the word out about her new site.Slowly the site began to improve. Diane was quick to realize the faults of her layout and switched it. She was successful in finding a couple of affiliates and a few more visitors trickled in, and the site began to grow. More and more pictures were added, and new entertainment features were thrown in. Various parts of the site were given quirky names, such as Half A Bee Haven, Heaven's Idles, Say No More, What A Quinkydink, and more.Almost daily Diane built onto the website. Finally, Idleized Heaven, or IH as it has been dubbed, was starting to get a bit of a name for itself. In August of 2003, Diane realized that her Expage server just wasn't reliable. Twice it had died and lost much of her site which she had to re-build from scratch. It was also very limiting in layout and content abilities, and she decided it was cheesy. It was time for an upgrade.Diane tried hosting the site at Geocities for a while, but really didn't care for it. She then tried a host of other servers, including Freewebs, Angelfire, and a few more. She didn't like any of them and came to the conclusion that no freebie server would be able to do IH justice.It was then that she turned to Homestead, a professional website-building company. She signed up for a gold account and was then able to obtain IH's first and main domain name: www.Eric-Idle.com. Pleased with Homestead's services and offers, she began vigorously re-building the website (again). The basic frameworks for the current site today were officially up and running within weeks.The first year following that point in time was one of change and progress. The site went through many layout edits and developments, and continued to grow in pages and visitors. Also, on December 16th, 2003, Diane met Eric himself, and requested with hopeful, pleading eyes for him to visit the website. His reply was, "I'll try", but there were no signs that he came to see it. However, in 2005, Diane received notification that Eric had indeed visited the site a few times, and liked it. He even added a few corrections on the 'Eric's Favorites And Facts' page, as well as forwarded on a movie-based interview.Since then, IH has only gone onwards and upwards. Diane has been forced to purchase numerous add-ons to support the now very-extensive site, and in late 2005 purchased a professional Yahoo package which she uses for extra disk space. The forum, guestbook, and new galleries are also associated through programs powered by PHP that came with the Yahoo package. The Yahoo purchase also included IH's second (and lesser) domain, www.Eric-Idle.net.The current site now boasts over 6,000 files and over 500 pages, and has three smaller sub-sites: the official fanlistings for Eric Idle, Idleized Heaven, and Spamalot. Idleized Heaven currently receives about one hundred visitors a day, and has had visitors from dozens of various countries across the globe. IH stands as the web's biggest and best Eric Idle website, and Diane is quite proud of it. She has accomplished her goal in creating an informative, interactive website that has delighted and enlightened Eric fans of all ages, and loves and appreciates any and all support towards this site. Thank you, everyone.
