Draccyning's Keep: Where it all started over 10 years ago

I first began designing web pages a decade ago as a way to keep in touch with family and friends who had become separated by hundreds of miles. At first, I simply assembled a montage of photos to share special occasions and personal events. Everything from new friends to the inside of my apartment, I used the web to maintain a level of involvement with my family. I never really considered making anything for other people to see.

Draccyning's Keep began as something of a photo album. In the summer of 1999, I finally received my first suit of reproduction Medieval armor, something that I had dreamt about my whole life. While waiting on it to be completed, I had scoured every corner of the world wide web, sifting through site after site, searching for just one good educational web page. The more that I had looked, however, the more frustrated I had become. Instead of discovering accuracy, I had become mired in fantasy; instead of detailed galleries, I had found only vague descriptions and obscure facsimiles.

Anyone who has ever typed the word 'armor' into a search engine has no doubt received tens of thousands of results from all across the globe. Between professional armorers, historical re-enactors, theme restaurants, and even fantasy warriors, the collective pool is as infinite and innumerable as the grains of sand on the beach. The more sites that I browsed through, the more frustrated I became. What I saw was armor on a wooden rack or laid out on a floor. What I wanted were full-color images showing what was historically worn underneath and see how everything was fitted together. Finally, out of desperation, I decided to build the site myself based on the bits and pieces of arcana that I had discovered over the course of months and years of research. Thus Draccyning's Keep was born.

I always envisioned my web site as a virtual castle or keep that is flanked by several massive towers, each holding a horde of information, dedicated to a different aspect of my life. Over time the Keep grew so large that I could no longer have it hosted on just one ISP user account. It became something more akin to a citadel than a mere castle. It was in 2005 when is why I finally made the decision to be my own personal server and host, and Draccyning's Keep became the very heart and soul of Paladin-Online.com. Within those virtual walls once laid a menagerie of different Web pages. Each site was unique and held some strong personal value to me. Colson Heritage was dedicated to my family genealogy; Paladin's Hall was my Avalon–my sanctuary; the Arming Pages demonstrated step-by-step how a fifteenth-century English man-at-arms would have been armed for combat on foot. There were also galleries of photographs taken from Renaissance festivals from South Texas to Wisconsin.

The site has always been in a perpetual state of evolution, from its humble beginnings on AOL in the winter of 1996 to the the debut of what I am calling Lonnie: Version 4. Draccyning's Keep is now divided into different sections, each specializing on one of my widely diverging intersts such as paintball, armour and international travel.