It's strange to think that Hive World Terra, its predecessors and its sister sites are approaching birthdays, but for some of them then their birthday in 2006 is now quite large!
Firstly, the youngest birthday. On the 2nd of February 2005, Skins@HiveWorldTerra will be one year old! The original opening announcement for Skins@HWT is still available from when we opened on DoWFiles.com hosting, as is the annoucement of the move to Skins.HiveWorldTerra.co.uk from late May.
Since its creation, and with the move to its own hosting without all of the adverts, the site has grown. It now hosts the widest range of canon or canon-compatible content from the likes of Hangar-8, MadMaffMan, Mel_Danes, SandwichWarrior, Xen and IBBoard, plus numerous community contributions.
Hive World Terra, as a website under the domain hiveworldterra.co.uk, is also approaching its second birthday! Following the suspension of the original site (see Six Years Old! for details), the official opening announcement wasn't until late May 2004.
More announcements will be made on that birthday closer to the actual day.
The first file transfer announcement is still available, as is the Hive World Terra opening announcement.
Hive World Terra didn't originally start out as a full website. Originally it was just the forums for my main website, with Hive World Terra being the 'interesting' name I came up with for them.
The Hive World Terra forums are now four years old as their own entity on their own hosting with their own domain (or subdomain at least!). Web.archive.org have the transfer date logged as the 1st of Feburary, with a "we've moved" index page being archived on that date.
Unfortunately the forums don't contain an announcement post about the transition from that long ago, although other posts do still exist!
Before the forums got their own domain, they were hosted on free Freedom2Surf hosting. The very first parts of the forum were founded, according to my profile, back in March 2001! The original members, apart from myself (formerly The Emperor) and TGSC (formerly Warmaster Horus) are no longer around, but many of their original posts are.
Three forum systems later (ikonboard, Invision Board and now phpBB) and the forums are still going, and still modded and skinned to be unique - I just can't leave them alone!
The original site is still partially available on web.archive.org, but wasn't as true a Hive World Terra as the later IBBoard.co.uk hosted forum.
Finally, the origins of it all - clan-bertram.co.uk. Hive World Terra developed as the location for my Games Workshop content from the site after my ISP pulled my clan-bertram.co.uk domain. It serves me right for taking a free domain name and basic HTML hosting from an ISP that forces you to log in on dialup every 30 days!
The domain was originally registered at Christmas time 1999 in the midst of "I'm going to have a website" excitement, but the first content went up slightly later in around January 2000.
Although the original site was a mish-mash of other things as well - I was a 15 year old with a website in the year 2000, so Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Friends and objects for Sims were part of the order of the day - the main focus was still Games Workshop.
Hive World Terra has taken up from its ancestor and is keeping up the GW tradition that goes back six whole years.
So, the oldest parts of the site are now six years old, and the site is still slowly growing. Hopefully we'll still be here in another six years time. You never know, the site may even grow into something as large and popular as its age suggests it should be!
Hive World Terra