About & History

This is my fanlisting history - how I got started with fanlistings, what were my first ones, and my different collectives.

Okay, if you know me, then you know that way back when I was a huge Charmed fan (I even made my own fan site for the show named Simply Dreams), and it is because of that show that I discovered fanlistings. I guess I would have found out about them eventually, but definitely much much later on. I don't know exactly when I first joined a fanlisting, but my first post about adding a separate section for them on Simply Dreams was on January 13, 2004. I remember listing them in the sidebar before that, but I quickly joined a lot of them, so I made a special page for them in the Site section of SD.

Simply Dreams wasn't my first venture into website making, though. Unfortunately, my first documented mention of fanlistings is in January 2004, but that was when I felt confident enough in my website skills to start a large fan site. My practice sites before that were just little things on Geocities, so I didn't really keep a record, which now, years later, I regret terribly. I might be able to check if the Wayback Machine has something saved, but I don't remember the URLs of the sites. And I highly doubt the WM archived all of the Geocities sites. It has the main page of GC until April 2001, so I'm not sure if it even crawled the site after that. If I was somehow able to recover something, I would be able to get the exact date when I joined a fanlisting, because I would have made a post about it on the main page. So to sum up that little rambling session, I'd say that I first came into contact with fanlistings in the fall of 2003.

The first fanlisting I ever owned was for the Cast of the LotR movies. I was still on my crazy fanlistings joining spree, and I had found the Taboolistings network, which the fanlisting was listed under. I hadn't even thought about making a fanlisting myself, but when I got an email saying the fanlisting was up for adoption, I thought what the hell, and applied. I got it, and launched my very first fanlisting Cast In The Shadows on June 22, 2004. I was still a little apprehensive about applying for something directly at any of the networks. It was, after all, the golden age of fanlistings and there were so many of them that I had a hard time coming up with a subject I truly wanted to run a fanlisting for. So it took another two adoptions - Charmed episode 1.20 on August 17, and the Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner movie on December 19 - before I sent in my first application at TFL at the end of 2004. It was for a webmaster, Natasha, who had a bunch of different celebrity fan sites that I liked. It is to this day the only fanlisting in the Webmasters category I've ever run.

It was also at the end of 2004 that my first fanlisting collective went online. It was called Witchcraft, because, come on, what else was I - a Charmed fanatic - going to call a new site :P It went online on October 17, and it listed all of my Owned fanlistings. As I've mentioned quite a few times already, I was obsessed with Charmed back then, and I accumulated a lot of fanlistings related to the show. So on December 13, 2005, I uploaded a special network site of Simply Dreams, just called SD Fanlisting Collective, that listed all of my Charmed related fanlistings. At the peak of my Charmed fanlisting career there were  about 25-30 of them.

The fanlistings I'd joined were listed at my Charmed fan site, until October 2, 2004, when I made a personal site and moved them over there. Joined fanlistings were never a part of Witchcraft or SD Fanlistings. They continued to be listed at my personal site, until March 26, 2005, when I uploaded a joined collective - LOST.

I put up new fanlistings like crazy, at one point I owned about 70 fanlistings at a time. But my interest in most of them was fleeting. I got bored with the subjects quickly, and closed them after just a few months. There were ones, though, that stayed up for just a little under 2 years, one of those being my very first Charmed fanlisting (episode 1.20). And so there was a time when I closed all of my fanlistings, except for some Charmed episode ones, and a few Stargate related physical fanlistings. As I was left with so few owned fanlistings, I found that having a separate collective for them was a bit redundant. So, I'm not exactly sure when, but probably some time in the middle of 2006, I closed my Owned collective, and just listed the fanlistings at my personal site under an Online Projects section.

It wasn't long after closing my owned collective that I lost interest in the whole fanlistings world. There was a time period of about 8 months during which I didn't own any fanlistings at all for the first time in 2 years. It was in April of 2007 that I found myself interested enough in a subject again to want to run a fanlisting for it. It was the TV show Heroes that I really got into, and I applied for two episodes. I felt like I was getting into fanlistings again, so I closed LOST and put up a new collective that combined my owned and joined fanlistings. The new collective, called Seeing Red, was launched on July 27, 2007. The name, Seeing Red, comes from a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Seeing Red". The episode is the start of one of my favorite BtVS storylines - Willow's grief over losing Tara, and her revenge. The storyline goes on for 4 episodes at the end of the 6th season.

I was really enthusiastic about building my own fanlistings again, so I cleaned up the joined section and planned how I was going to organize the owned fanlistings. And for a few months I was truly into taking good care of the four fanlistings I had started since April. But again, I just lost interest in the subjects and closed 3 of them in October of the same year. The only one I kept was for the relationship between Pocahontas & John Smith from Disney's Pocahontas, but I closed it in May of 2008. In June of 2008 I opened a fanlisting for a Prison Break episode, that only stayed alive for a month. So 2007 and 2008 were a slow year of fanlistings for me.

It was in March of 2009 that I really got into fanlistings again. The reason - if you know me, you know the answer - Twilight, of course. I had discovered Twilight 7 months earlier during the summer of 2008, but it took a while for me to get back into the swing of things. So the first few fanlistings I opened were Twilight related. And from there my fanlisting career got a new boost, there was even a time when I owned over 60 fanlistings at the same time.

At the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012 I had a lot of computer troubles. My collective and fanlistings were offline for a long time. Thankfully, the staff over at TFL were very understanding, and allowed me a troubles reprieve for the time period when I was unable to update any of my sites. I decided to cut back on the amount of fanlistings I had, so during my troubles reprieve I closed all of the fanlistings that I could possibly part with, and only kept the ones most precious to me. That left me with 18 fanlistings out of the 50 something that I had in the fall of 2011.

In June I found a new host and I wanted to start fresh, so that is why this new collective was born. Dazzling went online on June 19, 2012. The name was inspired by Edward Cullen from Twilight. A while back I had a Twilight blend challenge site by the same name, and after I closed that I used the hosting space to house Seeing Red. Although the name of my previous collective was Seeing Red, the name of the subdomain was Dazzling, so when it came time to name this new collective, I just went with Dazzling.

I now own about 20 fanlistings for a variety of subjects, and I love every single one. Although my interests still change and I've closed a few fanlistings during the few years I've been back in the game, I really feel that this time I'm here to stay.

I've owned about two hundred different fanlistings over the years, but lost interest in them, so most were closed down and a few adopted out to other people interested in the subjects.