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View Full Version : All About Us: Info about the Eagles Online site network



sodascouts
04-07-2009, 04:37 PM
Welcome to The Border, a message board for America’s greatest band. The Border is part of an extended network of unofficial websites created for the enjoyment of Eagles fans. Altogether, there are a total of eight separate Eagles Online network websites, which are all brought together through our hub site Eagles Online Central (http://www.glennfreyonline.com/). In addition to the hub site and this message board, there is an online fansite for each of the seven past and present band members.

I've been asked before how exactly this site network came about. For the curious, here's a little background. My name is Nancy (sodascouts on the board) and I am the creator of the sites as well as the adminstrator of the board. I became a hardcore fan of the Eagles relatively recently, in 2005. How did it all begin? With Stevie Nicks! I am a huge Fleetwood Mac/Stevie Nicks/Lindsey Buckingham fan, and indeed I got my “fansite webmaster chops” creating a site for them back in 2000 (BuckinghamNicks.net (http://www.buckinghamnicks.net/)). You can see from that site the seeds of the ideas for what I would create for the Eagles network…. lyrics, photos, downloads, message board, and the other usual material for any band’s fansite. It gave me useful web design experience I would utilize later in the interest of the Eagles as I similarly put up lyrics, photos, downloads, etc. for them!

Here’s how I got from Stevie Nicks to the Eagles. Stevie Nicks toured with Don Henley in 2005, and I attended their Chicago show. When I first heard the news that Henley was touring with Stevie, I thought of it as a "bonus" to the Stevie show rather than a virtue in its own right. I’d owned Henley's Actual Miles and Building the Perfect Beast albums for years, I owned Hell Freezes Over on cassette, and the Greatest Hits of the Eagles Volume 1 and Volume 2 were two of the first CDs I ever bought. Obviously, I enjoyed their music, but I wasn’t a hardcore by any means. All of that was about to change. Henley performed song after song that I loved, both solo and Eagles, and I realized that I wanted more. The next day, I bought the Very Best of the Eagles and it went into my car CD player… and didn’t come out again for a very long time. I loved every single song, and before long, I was buying the back catalog.

The more I listened to the Eagles, the more I wanted to hear. While I initially was drawn to Don Henley thanks to the concert, as I listened to the albums, I found I preferred the vocals of Glenn Frey. I started to buy his back catalog as well and before long, I was a Frey fanatic! He became my favorite male singer/songwriter. Now, anyone who knows me knows that once I get enthusiastic about something, I go full-throttle. As my Frey Fan Fervor grew, I began collecting material, memorabilia, and information about him. In the process of rediscovering the Eagles and becoming involved in the online fan community, I realized that there was no active fansite for Glenn Frey to be found anywhere on the internet. I figured with my website experience, my ever-growing pile of Glenn goodies, and my level of fan devotion, I was just the person to rectify that.

And so, on November 6, 2005, I unveiled Glenn Frey Online (http://www.glennfreyonline.com/). At the time, that was all I planned to do. However, with the success of the site, I also decided to create a small private message board called Flip City so I could communicate with my fellow online Frey fans in a low-key setting. Eventually, the membership grew to include fans of all the guys, so I restructured the board as an Eagles board. Shortly thereafter, I realized that as long as the board remained private, it couldn’t really grow to its full potential. Thus, on December 15, 2006, Flip City was opened to the public and renamed The Border to reflect its new inclusiveness. (Hard to believe all that happened years ago now! But time passes and you must move on.)

And as time passed, I continued to build up GlennFreyOnline (http://www.glennfreyonline.com/). I scoured Ebay in order to obtain songbooks, tourbooks, old magazines, and the like so that the site could feature as many high-quality, high-resolution photos as possible, in contrast to the types of photos typically found on the web. People on the board helped out by sending me material they’d purchased and collected. Through my connections in trading circles (I’ve been an active concert bootleg trader since 1998 in multiple fan communities spanning from U2 to Sarah McLachlan), I was able to build up an extensive multimedia collection to use for site video and music downloads. Again, I prided myself on providing material that was of higher quality than what one would typically find on the web.

In the process, I collected a lot of material about the other Eagles in addition to Frey. I had all of these concert bootlegs of the other Eagles just lying around in my apartment, as well as various articles, photos, etc. It seemed a shame not to share them. First, I tried uploading the videos to YouTube, but they just got taken down. I thought about simply linking the material to the message board, but there was so much of it! At that point, I was encouraged to create sites for the other Eagles in order to share all of this material with the rest of the fans.

At first, I was hesitant because the task seemed too big for one person, and I had a dissertation to finish (I got my PhD in August of 2008). These fansites are my hobby, not my life. However, I enlisted some help from my members and thus was able to start building sites for all of the Eagles, past and present. I rolled out Don Henley Online (http://www.donhenleyonline.com/) on May 1, 2007. Next was Timothy B. Schmit Online (http://www.timothybschmitonline.com/) on May 11, 2007. Of course, I wasn’t about to leave Joe out at this point, so Joe Walsh Online (http://www.joewalshonline.com/) was unveiled on July 7, 2007. After I had completed a separate site for all four current members, I thought we needed to bring them all together in one central location that also had information about the band. Thus, Eagles Online Central (https://www.eaglesonlinecentral.com/forum/../) was conceived. It opened on July 29, 2007. To complete the expansion, sites for former Eagles Don Felder (http://www.donfelderonline.com/), Randy Meisner (http://www.randymeisneronline.com/), and Bernie Leadon (http://www.bernieleadononline.com/) were unveiled on September 21, 2007, October 9, 2007, and October 15, 2007, respectively. As the sites have become more popular, I’ve ventured into expanding even further and creating pages for the site network on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/eaglesonlinecentral?fref=ts), Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/eaglesonline), and Tumblr (http://eaglesonlinecentral.tumblr.com/).

Here are the links to all of the main sites:

EaglesOnlineCentral.com (https://www.eaglesonlinecentral.com/forum/../) (EOC)
GlennFreyOnline.com (http://www.glennfreyonline.com/) (GFO)
DonHenleyOnline.com (http://www.donhenleyonline.com/) (DHO)
TimothyBSchmitOnline.com (http://www.timothybschmitonline.com/) (TBSO)
JoeWalshOnline.com (http://www.joewalshonline.com/) (JWO)
BernieLeadonOnline.com (http://www.bernieleadononline.com/) (BLO)
RandyMeisnerOnline.com (http://www.randymeisneronline.com/) (RMO)
DonFelderOnline.com (http://www.donfelderonline.com/) (DFO)


We invite you to explore all of the sites to check out the massive amount of information we have gathered about the band and band members. Each of the sites has a similar design: the information is organized in a tight four-pronged tree structure to avoid clutter and make navigation simple. The four overarching categories are as follows:

All About… – Includes original biographies, fun facts and trivia, interviews and articles, and other relevant information about the band or band member.

Discography/Filmography – Includes discographies that encompass the most complete Eagles-related lyrics database on the web, as well as filmographies of each member that contain many screen captures, video, and audio clips unique to the sites.

Photo Gallery – Includes the largest centrally organized photo galleries on the web of the members and the band, from all eras of their lives.

Downloads – Includes various types of graphics and media for download. The Eagles-related graphics such as avatars, icons, banners, and wallpapers are created by myself and Maleah, and constitute the largest collection of Eagles-related desktop and message board graphics on the web. Also, media such as ringtones, audio clips, and video clips that I digitized and converted are available for download.


We hope you enjoy yourself here. Please take the time to also review our Terms of Service (https://www.eaglesonlinecentral.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1) and Netiquette Guidelines (https://www.eaglesonlinecentral.com/forum/showthread.php?t=450). If you have any questions about anything pertaining to any of the sites, please feel free to ask. Our main goal is to provide a fun, friendly, and informative community for fans around the globe to come and share their love of our favorite band, the Eagles.