And that memorial was the birth of thebeaverdam.com. Ten years of TAB… or would’ve been. I spent half the day today, looking over the pages, using this Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Why I’m posting about it now instead of then?, well…
I didn’t really give it much thought of looking back in the past, until I saw the Indy 500 race yesterday(Helio Castroneves won that race), which reminded me of the time I created dragoncontraptions.com, and makes me question why this site is still up, when angry’s the only one that’s messing with it.
I wonder when will I be able to work on my site again(beniesbuilds.com). And that when I started to remember about my late website. Not only that, angry knows very little about HTML.
Anyway, according to this Wayback site, thebeaverdam.com was never the site I remembered, or even started back then on December 31st, 1999. Maybe their spider bot never took a picture of my site back then. But then, why was bjsworld.net created? Why is this tripod site I made back in 2000, a TAB-only site? Why did I move thebeaverdam.com to bjsworld.net? It’s a bunch of unanswered questions from my dark past.
What’s even more shocking, and confusing… I just did a whois on thebeaverdam.com, and it shows it’s creation date, on November 8th, 2002…not 1999. And it’s finally starting to hit me. “thebeaverdam.com” used to be one of those free domain sites with ads back in 1999. In November 2002, is when it became a pay for domain name.
There’s no whois data for bjsworld.net, like it never existed… however the Wayback Machine still holds data from the late site, back in 2001.
There is still a bjsworld.com active on the web. It’s not mine though.
My best guess through all of this mess, is I started with the free domain name, thebeaverdam.com. Then I decided to switch it to a multi-content site and move it to bjsworld.net, another free domain name, then I created my tripod site, the TAB-ONLY site. Years pass and I move everything back to the new pay for domain on 2002, as thebeaverdam.com.
The moving could’ve been caused by switching hosters, or that… ‘switcharoo virus’.
I wish I remembered another memorial. TAB’s 10th birthday was April 21st, 2007. But I was more interested in closing the site down due to lack of interest. Back on April 21st, 1997, TAB aired for the first time on Nickelodeon. But thebeaverdam.com was born two years after that.
Going over the news archives I have when TBD had Hamtaro on it, from 2003 to 2004, it was called “Just Another Hamtaro Site” back then, before that show got the axe just like TAB did. I thought Cartoon Network could be trusted, since they didn’t seem to have the taint that Dickelodean has.
It too one day, suffered the same fate as TAB. One day it was there, next… poof. It was gone.
I was such an idiot back then. I wish I knew what caused me to be obsessed with a….. a baby show. This show caused me to close the very thing that inspired me to make a website.
What’s more stupid was my lack of professionalism when I was doing the site. But I was younger, and I was so obsessed with TAB back then that I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to tell the world I loved TAB.
And if anyone needs a nostalgia fix, I found the old “Fish Head” song! It only exists in the archive. You can also hear the original Fishydance song by clicking the link on the bottom of the Fish Dance 2 page.
“Fish Head, fish head. Rolly-polly fish head! Fish head, fish head. Eat them up.. yum!”
Now if only I could find the original Hamster Dance. 🙂