Site History
You must be
very bored if you are actually reading this, but oh well. Here is the story behind this site and my Bsb
obsession.
I started
liking the Backstreet Boys sometime in early 1998, when I was in seventh
grade. I had heard "Quit Playing
Games" and "As Long As You Love Me" a lot on the radio, and I
liked both of those songs. I knew they
were by the Backstreet Boys, but I didn't know what the Backstreet Boys looked
like. The first time I ever saw them, it
was when they were performing on Nickelodeon's "All That". They were singing "ALAYLM". I didn't know any of their names or
anything. I thought they were all pretty
hot when I got my first look at them, but I when Brian stepped up to sing the
second verse of the song, I immediately had found my favorite. I thought he was so adorable, the eyes, the
smile, the voice, everything. I didn't
even know what his name was, but I automatically liked him the best out of the
five.
A few weeks
later, my best friend bought their CD and brought it over to my house so we
could listen to it. It was then that I
finally found out what Brian's name was.
A bought
the CD soon after that and became a big
Bsb fan, although I was never really obsessed with them until right before
"Millennium" came out. That
was when I started taping all of their TV appearances and buying posters,
books, magazines, etc. of them.
The summer of
1999 was when I read my first fanfic. I
was surfing around the net one day and got onto a page called "JJ and JoJo's Page", which was just starting out back
then. They had a story on there called
"Blind Love". I had never
heard of fanfics before then, so I was curious.
I read that story and loved it.
It even made me cry.
After that, I
started looking for more fanfics and found a bunch more websites with great
fanfics on it.
Eventually,
after reading endless amounts of fanfics, I got bored one day and decided to
try to write one of my own. It was
called "Years of Grace", which I eventually changed to "All the
Days of His Life". It was kind of
like Brian's life story, except it was a love story too, about him falling in
love with a girl named Grace that he had grown up with. I got pretty far on it and enjoyed writing
it, but I eventually got writer's block and never finished it. As I look back on it now, although parts of
it were pretty good, I think most of it was pretty lame.
After I got
bored working on that story, I got another idea for a story and decided to
write that one. That one was
"Heartache". I ended up
finishing that one and was pretty proud of it.
One day, I finally got the nerve to try and get it hosted on the
internet. The first site I had it hosted
on was "Escape From Reality".
There was only six chapters of it posted on that site when Kristy, the
webmistress, decided to shut the site down.
After that, I got it hosted on "Dreamer's Reality". Then, I started talking to my now good
friend, Rachel, on IM and eventually got it and the sequels hosted on her
page.
By the spring
of 2000, I had written several fanfics and decided I wanted a page of my
own. So, one night at the end of April,
I think, I sat down and built this website.
The idea behind the title was that it was a place for people to just
relax, get absorbed into some great fanfics, and forget about their problems
for awhile. It was a sanctuary for
dreamers.
Since I started
the page, I have written a lot more stories of my own, gotten a lot more hosted
stories, made a lot of changes on the site, and even moved it to its own domain
name, dreamers-sanctuary.com, because I had too much traffic for the free
Geocities service. I have no intention
of quitting writing fanfics and managing this site anytime soon because I love
doing both. I hope to keep doing this
for as long as I can.
Past
Layouts
I unfortunately don’t have screencaps for the older layouts, but maybe some of you who
have been coming to the site for awhile will remember. The newer layouts have screencaps;
just click on the name, and you can see what the layout looked like.
Version 1.0 – Sky (clouds, then stars)
(April
2000-October 2001)
Version 2.0 – Over the Rainbow
(October
2001-March 2002)
Version 3.0 – Purple/AJ
(March 2002-August
2002)
Version 4.0 – Shades of
(August
2002-December 2002)
Version 5.0 – Pink ‘n’ Metallic
(December
2002-April 2003)
Version 6.0 – Sunset
(April
2003-March 2004)
Version 7.0 – Thunderstorm
(March
2004-June 2004)
Version 8.0 – Imaginary
(June 2004-May
2005)
Version 9.0 – Never
Gone
(May 2005-October
2005)
Version 10.0 - Flashbackstreet (Sphynkter)
(October
2005-February 2006)
Version 11.0 – Safest Place to Hide
(February
2006-July 2007)
Version 11.0 – Nostalgia
(July
2007-December 2007)
Version 12.0 – Dreamlike State
(December
2007-Present)
April
Fools
I always do something with the site for
April Fools. Some years I’m more clever
than others…
2001: My first April
Fools,
2002: The second year, I
replaced my lovely purple AJ/Bsb layout with a fruity purple NSYNC layout and
said that I had converted to an NSync fan and was going to start writing NSync
fic instead. That one went over well
LOL.
2003: My friend Bianca
and I conspired together and switched the index pages of our sites so that when
you went to www.dreamers-sanctuary.com, you got her page,
The Backstreet Market, and when you went to www.backstreet-market.net,
you got Dreamer’s Sanctuary. People were
definitely puzzled over that one.
I don’t have
screenshots of any of those old pranks, but I have kept the April Fools updates
from the last few years. Click below to
see what the site looked like on April 1 of each year…
2004: Angelfire Error Page
Hit the back
button on your browser to get a new message; there are 20 in all!
2005: Flip-Flopped
I couldn’t
think of anything particularly great this year and ended up just mirror-imaging
or turning upside down my layout. Make
sure you click the image on the first page to see the main page.
2006:
Tanja’s BUSTED
A Danish girl
named Tanja plagiarized 9 stories from my site and switched the guys’ names to
a group called Busted a couple months before this year’s April Fools, so I
changed the site to look like she had hacked it and put the Busted guys faces
over Bsb on the layout and changed all of the author’s names to hers. Make sure you click on the links to the story
pages.
2007: Version BLUE
I threw
together a trippy layout with the most obnoxious song ever (the Kidz Bop version of “Blue (Da Ba Dee)”) and called it my
new layout. I also posted a fake chapter
of “By My Side,” which you can still read here.
2008:
Broken, the picture book
With much
excitement, I announced that my story “Broken” was getting published… as a
children’s picture book. The link will
connect you to the site for the fake book.
