Fanlisting History
Recently Six posted her fanlisting history at the TFL boards and I thought it was a neat thing to do so decided to write my own.
I first discovered fanlistings when Astraea posted at Maple Street that her fanlisting for episode 1x21 (Without a Trace) was up for adoption. Nobody offered to take it over and I thought that a fanlisting seemed like an interesting concept so I contacted her and adopted the fanlisting in October 2005. Back then I was still hosting all my websites on freeservers so I signed up for another freewebs account and of course updated manually. Following the link to TFL that Astraea gave me I discovered this whole world of fanlistings. I was still to new to really understand so put it on my things to watch list and left it at that.
However, I've never been somebody to leave something interesting alone. Therefore I read all the FAQ's countless times and the rules and soon plucked up the courage to apply for my first fanlisting. At the time I was still very much in the fandom for The Royal, to be honest the show had never been a real favourite of mine but it was the first fandom I ever entered and as such I had a couple of sites for it. These sites I combined into one but it was still flagging, I thought that something new and exciting (like a fanlisting) which had not been seen in the fandom before might revive it, I was wrong. The site didn't work out and I left the fandom in December 2005, closing the fanlisting along with everything else.
By then though I'd been bitten by the bug. I'd applied and been approved for two more episode fanlistings for Without a Trace, episode 1x01 and 1x03 and the TV show fanlisting for Heartbeat. I now had four fanlistings and updating manually was a pain and I was constantly making mistakes. It was December at this point and I'd been developing my Jack/Sam site (Complicated Story) and I now 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 and started applying for more fanlistings. As Complicated Story was my Without a Trace site I decided to host all my WaT fanlistings with that domain and any others at Holes and Chains. This is where I started to run into problems. I wanted to use a script to update my fanlistings and I chose Enthusiast but as I was using two domains (and actually two hosting packages) I had to use two installations of the script which was annoying. My next two fanlistings were for Lantana and Murder One.
I continued to apply for fanlistings and built up quite a collective. From browsing TFL I knew that fanlisting collectives were the way to go as opposed to just a page with links to the fanlistings. Consequently at the beginning of March 2006 I closed my second installation of Enthusiast and moved all my fanlistings over to a subdirectory of Holes and Chains nicknaming my collective Legal Affairs.
Now that I had a proper base to jump off I started to join more fanlistings, get affiliates and generally become a proper member of the fanlisting world. I continued this way until halfway through May when I decided to get my fanlisting collective it's own domain, after considering many ideas I went with Binded Souls, registering the domain with NameCheap.
On January 10th 2007 I received an email informing me I'd been selected to become a trouble checked at the The Fanlistings Network, for the Characters: TV category. I'd wanted to help out at the network for some time, to in some way try and help the community that had helped me. I love trouble checking, it seems like a horrible job but it's not, it keeps the network tidy which makes for a happy community.
In January 2007 I decided to go copyright free. Now at the beginning of February 2007 all of my fanlistings, my collective, my affiliate links, everything is all copyright free. Where images have been used it has been within the owners Terms of Use. I reached the decision to go copyright free gradually but mainly it was because I couldn't ignore my conscience anymore. It certainly makes my fanlistings look a little less pretty perhaps but they're still functional and I'm happier knowing that I'm no longer breaking the law.
Now I'm continuing to develop my collective, adding legal extras, making the temporary layouts a little less boring. I'm sure I will for a long time into the future.