This site serves as a personal journal as well as a dumping ground for my drawings and other creations.
Blog posts usually revolve around nature, Internet culture, everything fantasy and sci-fi, and pretty places I visit. I write about whatever I feel like writing about, without theme or agenda.
I use absolutely no AI. If I sound write weird it’s only because English isn’t my first language.
Design
The fonts used are UglyQua and good ol’ Verdana.
Technology
The site runs on self-hosted WordPress with a custom theme coded by me. For an extensive list of the tools I work with you can check out my /uses page. The WordPress plugins I use are:
- Akismet Anti-spam – spam protection
- Lightbox with Photoswipe – image lightbox
- WP-PageNavi – pagination
- YARPP – related posts in the Blog section
- Relevanssi – better search functionality
- Litespeed Cache – caching for faster load times
Accessibility
I strive to make this site accessible by using semantic HTML, proper heading hierarchy, enough colour contrast, being able to navigate via keyboard etc. If you notice something I’ve missed, you’re more than welcome to yell at me to fix it 😊
History
I got my first computer with Internet access in 1998 or thereabout – and it completely amazed me! In fact, it changed my entire life. One of the first things I did was to learn how to build websites.
My very first site (in the late 90s) was a cyber pet adoption site hosted on Geocities. Being an animal lover slash artist it was no wonder I stumbled upon the community of pixel art and cyber pets.
Sometime in 2001-2002 I moved away from cyber pets and created a more personal website about me and my life. The word “blog” wasn’t invented yet, so it was called having an “online journal”. Comments and other personal interactions were handled through e-mail and guest books.
In early 2005 I bought my first own domain, CyanSunrise.com. In 2009 I switched to RockWitch.net. My site was divided into one Swedish blog and one art/pixel site in English for the first two years, but I soon got tired of the split-personality thing and merged everything into one. In the process, I also made the decision to only use English. Most of the people I had gotten to know online were from other countries so it made the most sense.
In January 2015 I changed my domain name again to ImaginaryKarin.com. The name was, I think, a product of its time. The 2010s was when everyone online became a “personal brand” and monetization started to take off on a wider scale. I never blogged for money but I did scale away a lot of old school content that seemed silly in these new modern times. Probably the most soul-less years in my online life…
It wasn’t until 2022-23 when I discovered the web revival scene I found some spark again. That’s when I realised the old Internet was still out there – and younger generations had found it too! Thank the gods!
In August 2022 I decided to give my pixel art and dolls its own site and a year later, in August 2023, I gave it the domain name HexedPixels.com. It’s running as a sister site to this one.
In November 2025, almost 11 years since last time, I decided it was time to give my main site a new domain name to reflect this old/new phase. Ended up chosing Hexed Hearth because I thought it went well with Hexed Pixels and my fanlisting collective Heart of Snow.
Past domains
- ImaginaryKarin.com
- RockWitch.net
- CyanSunrise.com
