About the Owner Maxine MagicFox

My real name is Penna Marie Fischer. I was born in Ohio on June 2, 1984. My father was in the Navy and I have lived in many states, the list that I know of, though I think I'm missing one or two, include: California, South Carolina, Georgia, Connecticut, and now Pennsylvania. I have also frequently visited family in Ohio, West Virginia, and Florida.

I am currently in-between High School and college. I am an as-of-yet-unpublished writer. However, since writing doesn't pay well, I plan to go to Medical School and train to possibly be a Cardiac Surgeon.

My interests, besides writing and medicine, include reading, video games, anime and manga, and collecting fantasy figurines (my room currently has six dragons, two wizards, a pegasus, and a dragon poster, and a fairy poster. Oh and my two sword-hilt-candle-holders.)

I have been the sole owner and creator of MCLoZ, which I have worked on for many years now. I have enjoyed the website greatly as well as the fans and I'm glad to be able to share one of my joys with everyone.

About Midnight Castle

In my sophomore year of High School I took an HTML basics class two-three days a week for one semester. It was this class the helped me to get started and gave me the idea for my website. While learning I created a site based on my "then" four loves: reading, movies, video games, and music. It had a castle theme and in each "area" you would get to travel through rooms and meet characters from the stories I write in which Midnight Castle originated. That's right. The title "Midnight Castle" has absolutely NOTHING to do with Zelda (or Hyrule Castle) but everything to do with me.

As time went by and Majora's Mask was announced, at the time named Zelda Gaiden, I decided to shorten my website to only one love: Zelda. Before, the section where I talked about Zelda had already been titled "Midnight Castle's Legends of Zelda," but it became the stand-in title while I put together my all-Zelda site.

Of course, MCLoZ was not the only site I have ever worked on. I have had three Tolkien sites, an anime site, a stories site, and an "anything" site in which Midnight Castle's "four loves" theme made a return once more. However, I somehow always returned to MCLoZ and after it's second successful year, I gave up the other sites completely and have since fully devoted myself to MCLoZ... though I won't lie... I play around with the idea of another site every now and again. Otherwise I might get too bored with MCLoZ.

Creating MCLoZ

As I said, when I first began, I was learning HTML. The original site started out pure text in which I added random wallpapers and images as I learned the codes and just thoroughly enjoyed playing with everything.

When I came up with the shortened idea of MCLoZ I must give a lot of credit to a site entitled Odyssey of Hyrule, of which I was a fan at the time. I copied his design, adding in my own playful colors and new images, and re-arranging some things. It also taught me a vast range of codes and how to put them into proper effect. Yes, it wasn't right, and it taught me several valuable lessons:

How to use tables, It's not right to copy a site's design, and to never act like VGX, the webmaster of OoH. Many of you will notice in chatting with me, I do not even pretend to hold that "God of Site" impression many other webmasters strive for (and I give out my contact info so ANYONE can chat with me), and instead of bashing I will give good and honest criticism and even try to help with coding if I can. Newbies on the net are expected and its human nature to copy what they really like. I have found the gentle approach of explaining why that's wrong and encouraging them to finally do their own idea is ten times more successful than VGX's harsh treatment of me and banning me from the forums I loved. I think the biggest proof of the success of this is Zelda Domain. You have no idea the reputation Nathan had... but he just needed to be set in the right direction and have things explained better.

I kept that design for quite a while, playing and rearranging, even when I switched to Midnight Castle's Anything Website it was very similar. I did lose interest in MCLoZ at this time and focused on my anime site, but after returning to MCLoZ I attempted a new design, which did fail and I returned back to the OoH-smiliar design. By this time, though, I started to affiliate with other sites and got people coming in. The marginal success moved me to once again attempt a new design.

This time the new design was a success and I kept it for quite a while until I was in my site's second year. At this time I completely devoted myself to MCLoZ and ended all other sites, including my third attempted Tolkien site. Based on that failed Tolkien site, though, I created the first MCLoZ design that stayed for over a year, and I moved off of geocities into the world of being hosted by other sites. It was also then I started keeping track of my logs. This MCLoZ design lasted from February 2002 until May 2003 when I lost my hosting and decided to close down my site for good.

I returned that November, however, with the same temporary design, still looking for proper hosting (our temporary server had too little bandwidth to sustain us). The new year brought with it our current host, Zelda Legends. And the 8.0 design most everyone knows.

That May we officially became MCLoZ.net. ^_^ Yay! And we have enjoyed it ever since.

And the finally, last but not least, April 5th brought our current design with it, in which my youngest sister Eve/Rissa had played a substantial part in helping with decide what to do with it. And as MCLoZ continues to grow older, I hope to enjoy more and more wonderful memories.

MCLoZ's Popularity

I'm always asked this question by people and I think I'll include my answer here. "How did you make MCLoZ so popular?"

My usual response is "It's popular?". To be quite honest, I never made MCLoZ out of interest for popularity, though any site is created out of the desire for an audience. I created and still work on MCLoZ out of the simple enjoyment that I find in HTML coding and posting my Zelda knowledge. I do not use CSS or PHP and you will notice that while the pages have a general design and pattern, that they don't have the same colors or fonts as when compared to other pages, though I do have my favorite set of fonts. I do this because it gives me a chance to play and takes away the boredom of professionalism. Coding is too much fun to be wasted on PHP which does it all for you and you just fill in a bunch of text boxes.

As for the "how" did it become popular. I honestly do not know. Random luck? Divine intervention? I went away between June 2002 and November 2002 on a move. When I returned I discovered that my hit counter was no longer reading 20 visitors daily but had an astonishing 200 visitors daily. From there up until the "closing" of MCLoZ May 2003, we experienced a comfortable 400-600 visitors daily. The closing and reopening of course destroyed those wonderful numbers and I had to start once again from scratch, barely able to make it to the 200 mark for many months. When I last looked, I had just reached 300 visitors during September 2004 when my host experienced major problems and his site and his hostee's sites crashed and died without back up. Since then I have been without a counter since the one I used in the panel was taken down to preserve speed while sites were built back up.

That's right. That means from then until now (July 2005) I have been without a counter. And you know what, I really couldn't care less. I know my site is doing well just based on the e-mail and the submittions, especially to our new Image Gallery. The fans are important to me but as for how many I have, I don't care. Too many sites focus only on that and I'm not going to be one of them. I enjoy working on MCLoZ just for fun.

So "How did I make it so popular?" Is it popular? I really don't know. If you think it is, then ask yourself... what do you enjoy about my site? I do what I want and put up whatever ideas come to my mind. Link's Infinite List of Torture, for example, came to me simply when I was chatting with a buddy and we got to talking about the more enjoyable ways of hurting Link. You want to make your site popular? Just add your own personal touch that you can't find on any other website. Your own flare and personality and your devotion for your website will shine through each and every time and THAT is what attracts people. There are hundreds of Zelda sites on the net these days, all bearing the same information. So, what else can you do to make yours stand apart from everyone else's?

As for the numbers, if you are truly devoted to them (and I'm sorry to hear that) they will come with time. You are not going to be popular over-night. Nor in two months unless you are really exceptionally lucky. It will take a good year or more. In that time I hope you have a steady, nice looking layout and enough content to back it up, along with the activities that will attract people to stay. Your first year or more is going to be you working and getting very little from it. Don't lose heart! Just keep going. Remember, the fun is in the site, not how many visitors you get.

On a side note, I found that my counter has returned this morning (probably been there for a few days). ^_^ I opened it up and discovered that I'm now doing 1000 visitors a day, give or take a hundred. From 300 to 1000 in which I didn't care or even know. ^_^ Thank you everyone. I still don't care about the number, though, and will continue with my same attitude. I really do love Zelda and with the coming of Twilight Princess and a Zelda DS game, the future is looking brighter and brighter and I'm excited to be here for it and able to share the excitement with my viewers.

Rights to the Site

One last frequently asked question. A few have asked who was the first owner of MCLoZ. I think I surprise them when I tell them that I was the one who created MCLoZ and have been its only owner. To further this statement, at no time will MCLoZ ever be up for sale or for another owner... except possibily my youngest sister if she is interested. That means whole or partly. When MCLoZ goes down, that's the end of it.