Site History

This site was originally born in the late summer of 2005 and was called True Fans. I came up with this name out of the blue when I was trying to think of something "fan-ish". I actually started building fanlistings in September of 2003 and I was doing mainly I Dream of Jeannie related fanlistings at first. But it wasn't long before I started wanting to do more than just IDOJ related ones. So I applied and got some more going. By the summer of 2005, I was getting bored with manual updates. I was also beginning to pile up some fanlistings and decided I wanted to consolidate them in one place and I wanted to learn phpfanbase. But I could not use my college's server or my cable server for that as I could not get a mySQL database. So I got on the TFL board one day and posted that I was looking for a host and I had a couple of offers, but they didn't seem like the right ones. At the same time, I found another post by Stacie offering hosting to anyone who needed it. So I conacted her and she got me set right up. Then my friend Michele offered to help learn phpfanbase and she spent a few hours online with me one night and in no time, I had it down. I was all settled at Stacie's server with my own subdomain. And for a year and a half I was on phpfanbase. By January of 2006, I was so bored with the way I was building sites. I was using a WYSIWYG program and I got tired of using it and my friends Nikie and Leigh Ann had begun using div layers on their sites and I loved the way it looked. Also, by that time, people were moving away from phpfanbase becuase of security issues and were switching over to Enthusiast. So I decided that would be a good thing for me too. So I enlisted Nikie's and Leigh Ann's help in learning div layers. So one Friday night in January of 2006, Nikie spent over 4 hours online with me showing how this kind of coding was set up and showing me where to put it in the html coding. I had most of the site up that night, but it took me a few more days to get everything going just right. Then, wah-lah, True Fans had it's first layout with div layers. Then it took me a few more weeks to get all my fanlistings converted over to Enthusiast and set up with new layouts which were generously made and donated by Nikie and Leigh Ann. Nikie and Leigh Ann both allowed me to use some of their coding pages from their own collectives and fanlistings to go by for examples when I needed to.

Then in August of 2006, Nikie very generously let me move over to her server as I thought Stacie's server was messing up, but by the time I realized it wasn't, I was already half way moved over to Nikie's server and I just decided to keep on moving over to Nikie's. I had also decided by then that I wanted my own hosting and domain and that it would be easier to move off of Nikie's server than Stacie's as I talked to Nikie more than Stacie and Nikie said she would help me out when it was time. Well it turned out to be a lot longer than I had hoped before getting my own domain. I had hoped by Halloween, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas, etc... But in January of 2007, I up and bought my own domain and hosting space. By this time, Nikie and I had been having an awful time with Frozen Midnight Hosting because the downtime was getting more and more rampant and our mySQLs kept going down. So I finally had enough of them and on January 17, 2007, I bought my domain from Register4Less and my hosting from Shark Space. Both had been recommended to me by friend Jason. Thus, Marvelous Grace was born.

I came up with the name Marvelous Grace from an old favorite church hymn of mine called "Grace Greater Than All Our Sin". The first verse starts out with, "Marvelous grace of our loving Lord...". I wanted a name that had to do with grace because the Lord had been teaching me a lot about living by His grace. His grace is His undeserved, unmerited favor. He free gives it to us without finding fault because He loves us so much. And it is only by His marvelous grace that we are saved. We could never do enough on our own to earn His salvation and by His loving demonstration of His love and marvelous grace on that cross when He took our sins upon His back and died in our place, He provided His salvation so richly and freely. All we have to do is receive it by grace in faith. I have also come to realize that it is also by His marvelous grace that I can live each day of my life. So when I was trying to think of a new name for this site, I could not think of a better name than Marvelous Grace.