Believe it or not, yesterday marked the 15 year anniversary of TBLWrestling.com’s creation. Well, to be exact, yesterday marked the 15 year anniversary of me creating a small personal homepage on GeoCities called “The Balrog’s Lair” where I played around with HTML and posted some random, one-line thoughts from time to time. What was the easy-to-remember URL of that homepage? How about: http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Track/5869/ Pretty nasty URL, huh? 🙂
The look of The Balrog’s Lair was rough – black background, generic grey horizontal rules, plumes of fire on each side of the enlarged Times New Roman font that proudly displayed the name of the website in the top center of the page… it was awesome! In fact, I did a little digging and managed to find the animated image of the fire plume that graced either side of the top of the page. Take a look:
Pretty sweet, huh? 🙂
Those were the good old days of the internet wrestling world. There weren’t many wrestling websites out there besides the WICN Newsboard (which I was privileged to work at for a while), Scoops Central (Al Isaacs was the best), and the original 411 Wrestling News Page. Those pages were great. I originally created The Balrog’s Lair as a place for me to play around on the internet and expand my HTML capabilities, but it soon became a place where I was writing about professional wrestling. In fact, you can find some of my early writings still embedded in the pages of TBLWrestling.com (like the Classic Matches area, for example, where most of those articles were written between 1996 and 1997).
There isn’t much new that I have to say about TBLWrestling.com as it exists during its fifteenth anniversary. Much of the history of the site you can find by reading the TBL @ Ten Series from five year ago when we celebrated our ten year anniversary. As a part of that anniversary celebration, I wrote a summation column where I talked about what I’d like to see for TBLWrestling.com through 2016. For better or worse, the site hasn’t really progressed on many of those wish list areas.
In fact, the biggest insider update that I can give about TBLWrestling.com is that I’ve seriously considered shutting the website down over the last 2 – 3 years. Truthfully, the reason why I didn’t immediately shut the site down when those thoughts began to enter my head a few years ago was because the site generates advertising revenue. While I wasn’t (and largely haven’t been) happy with the product that TBLWrestling.com ultimately became over the last five years since the TBL @ Ten Series was written, I didn’t (and still don’t) see a purpose in shutting down a site that generates revenue. It just didn’t make sense to me and it continues to not make sense to me – especially when new advertising opportunities are presenting themselves to me as late as last month.
There is more to the story of the last few years of TBLWrestling.com than just me being unhappy with the product. At the same time, a few years ago I became completely disinterested in the WWE product. I’m still disinterested in the WWE product and after watching the debacle that was WrestleMania 27, I don’t see that changing any time soon. Also, I became very interested and enthralled with the TNA Wrestling product. I love it! In fact, I started TNAStars.com because of how much I liked the TNA Wrestling product. You combine all of these items and what you wind up with is a guy who really didn’t want to bother himself with TBLWrestling.com too much.
Typically, when an internet writer gets that feeling – they just stop writing for that particular website. That’s not so easy when you own the website that you’re not pleased with, though! And let me be clear – my problem with this website wasn’t related to the great people who were contributing and continue to contribute to its content. Actually, that was (and continues to be) a bright spot at TBLWrestling.com over the last few years – just look at the amazing columns that The Luce Cannon or Julian Radbourne are writing these days! Eddie T. did a great job updating the website until he had to leave us last year. However, I’m pleased to announce that Eddie T. will be rejoining TBLWrestling.com in the coming weeks and months with some specialized content – first centered around the WWE pay-per-view programming.
Eddie T. is a good friend and I’ll be glad to welcome him back to TBLWrestling.com.
The future of TBLWrestling.com is one that I’m not confident enough to write about yet. Ideally, this website will take a more active role in independent reporting of professional wrestling news much like the team I assembled at TNAStars.com. Also, this website will ideally have independent results reports that stand head and shoulders above the other websites out there. I would also like to see TBLWrestling.com retake its place as an originator of content, but in 2011 – that might be hard to do.
Another one of my great hopes for this website is that I find the time to fully complete the migration from TheBalrogsLair.com to TBLWrestling.com. For those of you who have been following us for a while – you know that we used to exist as TheBalrogsLair.com. Well, we had a LOT of content on that domain name when we made the switch to TBLWrestling.com and I just haven’t found the time to make the full migration… but I will.
Some things that I don’t see returning include any TNA Wrestling coverage on the TBLWrestling.com newsboard. We have a feed directly from TNAStars.com on the bottom of each page of this website and that feed is more than sufficient to cover anything and everything TNA Wrestling related. I also don’t see a separate e-mail mailing list coming back to TBLWrestling.com, which is a bit of a shame as the original TBL Newsletter had thousands of subscribers before that mailing list was lost (damn it). I’m still working on recapturing many of the e-mail addresses associated with the old TBL Forums and will ultimately dump them into the TNAStars.com Mailing List. My suspicion is that the TNAStars.com Mailing List will become the de facto mailing list for all e-mail communication between those of us who operate the website and those of you who want to get updates in your inbox. To that end, you can add yourself to the TNAStars.com Mailing List by using the form below.
And that’s where we are in 2011 at TBLWrestling.com. I urge you all to stay tuned to this website because it’s not going anywhere – it’s only going to get better!
– E-mail feedback to joe1897@gmail.com
– Read more Balrog Babblings!
AH the good ol days on geocities before Vince owned the wrestling world… to go back to when wrestling was good when stonecold was A underrated tag wrestler and Paul E was his manager
Should I start it? Alright, here we go…
“Memories… Like the corners of my miiiiiind… Misty water colored meeeeemories… Of the way, we were…”