Hidden In The Sand (Website)

Hidden In The Sand is the "Ultimate Tally Hall Fan Headquarters". Often abbreviated "HITS", it is a comprehensive fan site that was run independently by Coz Baldwin until his death in 2022. It is now run by Joshface, assisted by a likeminded team of administrators. The site has continually been a cornucopia of information for new fans who like Tally Hall but don't know where to start. The site often updates through its blog and a Twitter account. It also contains the Tally Hallmanac, a fan-run wiki about the band.

2005-2007: Founding Hidden In The Sand

Long ago, on March 10th, 2005, The Official Tally Hall LiveJournal was started by Coz Baldwin, followed the next day by the launch of a Yahoo! Group. A few months later, Tally Hall's website opened up their forums for the first time. The LiveJournal was the place where Coz kept track of all the news in the blog, but also kept track of all the show dates, reviews, and other news articles about Tally Hall.

Meanwhile, the forums began to get popular and eventually people began to demand a fan site be created. Coz initially balked at the idea, claiming the LiveJournal was already the fan site. But it was obvious people wanted something more official. So Coz volunteered to build it.

From the beginning, it was built from the ideas of the fans. In fact, when deciding upon a name, it was Remy Owen (formerly known as Jennie Sadler) who suggested "Hidden In The Sand" be the name.

The site officially launched on April 2nd, 2006 with a light blue body topped with a hand drawn beach scene, with blank-faced figures wearing multi-colored ties sticking out from the sand.

In the words of Coz,

"I didn't want this to be a typical fan site. I felt it was important that the content was fan-driven as much as possible. It's not a knock-off of the official site, like many fan sites are. It's quite literally the fan's site. The one-stop shop where you can get all the information you need in one place. If the content you want isn't there, the fan puts it there. From buddy icons, to avatars, to photos and videos. The FAQ was an original part of the site. It was intended to answer any questions people had and allow new ones to be added by the people using the site. This is a Grand Central Station of Tally Hall information."

The site is constantly evolving. Some ideas stick, some ideas don't. Reviews and articles were dropped due to the simple fact that Tally Hall's popularity grew. At the time, the mentions were few and far between so it was easy to keep them all together and there was necessity in doing so. Now you'll find pages upon pages of results when you search for Tally Hall. The LiveJournal community continues to exist but is rarely updated.
On April 23rd, 2007 Hidden In The Sand launched a YouTube page called HITSdotcom. Which hosts an interview with Tally Hall

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  Hiddeninthesand.com as it looked in 2006 (version 1)

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  Hiddeninthesand.com as it looked in 2008 (version 2.0)

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  Hiddeninthesand.com as it looked in 2009 (version 2.5)

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  Hiddeninthesand.com as it looked in 2013 (version 3.0)

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  Hiddeninthesand.com as it looks now (version 4.0)

2008-2016: Site Revamps

Version 2.0

Hiddeninthesand.com underwent a major facelift and changed its look to a sand-colored body area topped with an actual photo of the band looking as if they're climbing on top of the page. The content stretched to the width of the browser window. The debut of the new design was on July 7th, 2008. With it, HITS also launched a Facebook Page, a Twitter page and a Myspace page.

Version 2.5

HITS Icon circa 2009

It didn't take long for Coz to get sick of the design and re-worked it to have a fixed-width, fine-tune the graphics, and clean up the code to run much faster. The basic look of the site did not change, however, and it was given the version #2.5 when it launched on September 20th 2009. Along with the debut came a new IRC chatroom and The Tally Hallmanac.

In 2011 Hidden In The Sand launched a Google Plus account. Coz remarked on a Hidden In The Sand post: "It’s really quite a great network, however it still needs people using it and no one wants to use it if they’ve already got Facebook going. That’s ok. I think because of the intergration with the rest of the web, Google+ will succeed." It did not; Google Plus shut down their services in April of 2019.

Version 3

Despite a soft-launch in November 2012, the official unveiling of HITS 3.0 occurred on March 10th, 2013. While the blog section was the only one previously powered by Wordpress, this new iteration of HITS saw Wordpress take over the whole site. With it, a new FAQ system was put in place; one that is more efficient, require less maintenance, and just easier to navigate. HITS 3.0 uses responsive design so all screen sizes and window sizes will be able to handle the website. The content will adjust to you.

The logo also was slightly adjusted for the new site, from one with sand behind the "H" to one that's just solid blue with a drop-shadow from the "H".

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Version 4

HITS v4 was announced on September 11th, 2016. The new design featured a larger masthead image and focused on rich media filling up the home page. There were no new additions or significant changes to the structure of the site, although the post category of "ミラクルミュージカル (Miracle Musical)" was changed to "Joe Hawley" in order to properly accommodate future releases from Joe that were not under the Miracle Musical moniker.

Note: During the year of 2016, the logo of HITS was adjusted from an "H" to a "10" in celebration of HITS' 10 years on the web. This was reflected in the masthead image and on social media accounts.

2017-2022: April Fools, Logo Updates, and Discord Launch

Every April 1st, HITS is known to post updates that are, in fact, April Fool's pranks, such as the death of Henry Hume IV, a fictional character from Tally Hall's Internet Show

On November 16, 2018 the Hidden In The Sand twitter account tweeted regarding a logo update; the same day they tweeted an alternate version and a poll to decide which one would be used as the twitter logo. .

The same day, Hidden In The Sand experienced some problems with it's database however, as of November 2022, the site remains active.

Hidden in the Sand would open a Discord server in May of 2022, after a short period of creating the server. It soon reached over two thousand members.

2022-Present: Post-Coz Era

In July 2022, Hidden In The Sand's original founder, Coz Baldwin, passed away. Before his death, Coz put into place a team of people to carry on his legacy, and run the Hidden In The Sand website, as well as it's associated social media profiles. Due to complications with the legacy handover process, Hidden In The Sand went down in September 2022, but was reinstated a month later

In September 2022 Hidden In The Sand admins directed the fansourced cover album 'We Like to Play it All: A Tribute to Tally Hall', which was dedicated to Coz Baldwin, and featured his version of Never Meant To Know as the opening track.

In November 2022 Hidden In The Sand admin notfire worked to create a new gallery for Hidden In The Sand, hosted at https://hiddeninthesand.com/gallery, updated with new pictures, so that imagery no longer had to be hosted through Smugmug, as it was done previously.

In 2024 the Hidden In The Sand Discord reached over 4,600 members!