Still Searching

I’ve had an online prescence since 2001. I started off as co-admin on a friends fansite for the TV show The Royal. I then decided to branch out on my own and started fansites for Judge John Deed and Midsomer Murders. I knew how to handcode html but I was new to actually publishing my sites so I stuck with freewebs pagebuilder. Over time though that wasn’t enough and so I closed the Midsomer Murders and Judge John Deed sites and opened a fansite called St Aidens which was for Heartbeat and The Royal. I also started a messageboard for Heartbeat using proboards. I was still hosted on freewebs but I’d started to use html again to build the site.

A few months on and I decided I wanted to express my other interests so I started Spy Master’s World which had pages for The Royal, Heartbeat, Midsomer Murders, Waking the Dead and Without a Trace. That worked for a while but it was hard promoting five sites in one which were for very different programs, I’d also lost interest in a couple and so maintaining them was a waste of time. It was August 2005 at this point, I’d had Spy Masters World for about 18 months but I dissolved it.

In it’s place I started two fansites Complicated Story for Without a Trace, focusing on Jack and Sam’s relationship and The Way We Were for The Royal. I also started Holes and Chains, a messageboard using Invision Free and featuring areas for Without a Trace, Heartbeat and The Royal. Soon I went into partnership with another girl from The Royal fandom and introduced more forums for New Tricks, Born and Bred and Judge John Deed. However, these didn’t prove very popular and it was at this point that I left The Royal fandom closing the fansite and ending the partnership. This left my Without a Trace fansite and the Holes and Chains discussion board which now just had areas for Without a Trace and Heartbeat.

Between when this happened and December I worked on Complicated Story and also discovered fanlistings. Thanks to friends I made in the Without a Trace fandom my graphics and design skills improved and I felt that my graphics skills were sufficient to get paid hosting. A friend recommended Hosting Matters and so I signed up for six months with them.

I bought two domains Holes and Chains [dot] com and Complicated Story [dot] com. Holes and Chains stayed a messageboard mainly and I bought vbulletin to use. I also used the Holes and Chains domain to host my new fanlistings collective, Legal Affairs. The friend who’d recommended Hosting Matters also ran a VB board and she helped me with the customising. She was looking to merge her Without a Trace board with another board and so we decided to merge Holes and Chains and Silent Imperfection together, forming The Addicted in March 2006.

Rather than just have two shows for discussion, Without a Trace and Heartbeat, we decided to make it a multiple show discussion board and each admin had two shows that they liked, plus the two original ones, therefore we ended up with twelve. I kept Holes and Chains as a collective, and hosted my fanlistings and my new personal site, Still Searching, there. However, as my fanlistings collective grew I wanted to get it it’s own domain. I decided I didn’t like Legal Affairs as a name so renamed it Binded Souls and bought the domain to match. My personal site was already called Still Searching so I just bought the domain. I bought these two domains in May 2006.

I continued maintaining everything and then in June I started a writing community and bought the domain Sacred Days. It was also at this time that my hosting expired and I decided to move providers, to ASO. I now was no longer using my Holes and Chains domain for anything except links to my other domains. Therefore I decided not to keep it when it came up for renewel in December. As it was the end of summer and before I went back to school I decided to merge my personal site and my collective together now so I wouldn’t have to worry about it when December rolled round.

On the 23rd of October 2006 I bought Wilsons-Website-World.co.uk in the view of starting a webdesign business. As of January 2007, it is still an on going project and not yet live. In December 2006 I purchased another domain Broken-Destiny.org to start a House/Stacy fansite. Currently I’ve only done a small amount of work on the site and it’s not yet open.

In January 2007 I decided that I would try and go copyright free. Up till then I’d freely used whatever I liked in terms of pictures, brushes etc. I remained undecided how to proceed with these fan endeavors and my personal site was the only one copyright free for a long time. In February 2007 I purchased a reseller account with Surpass which I use for my sites and also sell on space to others. In July 2007 I ended my contract with ASO and completely moved to Surpass.

In terms of copyright I eventually made up my mind what to do. I changed the broken-destiny.org to be my collective and made this site personal only. At this time there wasn’t a blog, there was some art and writing and not a lot else. The House/Stacy site disappeared into the ether as an idea never to see the light of day again, I closed my Jack/Sam fansite Complicated Story and converted all my fanlistings to be copyright free. All this took some time, I don’t think I’d completed the process until the end of the summer in 2007.

Currently, the only site I still run that violates copyright law is my messageboard the-addicted.net I still haven’t decided what to do with that. In January 2008 I purchased another domain jsmaster.com which I decided would be my creative outlet, it’s currently still under construction. In April 2008 I decided to turn this site into a blog as there wasn’t much else here and that’s where we currently are.