I wrote my first real post on this blog exactly one year ago today. This post marks the 473rd entry which means I've blogged roughly 1.3 times per day. Those posts have accumulated over a massive 6,700 comments. However, I'm not here today (actually, 2:01 am in the morning) to tell you the current status of this blog, you already know about that.
How It Started
As I've told others in blog interviews (see the about page for links), blogging for me began from pure curiosity for various pieces of blogging software. I had heard so many good things about WordPress back in July of 2005, that I decided to try out a copy on the local server running on a 1st Gen Mac Mini. I began playing with different themes, editing CSS here, writing PHP there.. it got addictive.
It wasn't until I stumbled upon Michael Heilemann's K2 theme (which was Alpha Four back then), that I knew I wanted to take blogging seriously. After having tried countless themes, K2 seemed like it was perfect. That same day I donated a few bucks to Michael's cause and bought my domain name. To this day, my entire site has been based on some form of K2 or another. However, at this point my theme might be too hacked up to really be called K2 anymore.
What you may not have known was that I started blogging last August and had a good 40 posts or so until my Mac Mini called it quits and the hard drive died (I had still been serving off of it). That explains why my first post talks about migrating to Media Temple.
Why It Continues
So what keeps me going and involved in blogging every day you ask? You. I judge the success of each post by the amount of user interaction it sparks. It doesn't matter if you agree with my posts or not, I absolutely enjoy receiving comments (except spam, Akismet++). User interaction on posts like this and even that are good examples.
I realize that many of you enjoy reading my content through RSS. That's good and I wanted to say that I'll always be providing full, ad-free feeds. However, I encourage you to minimize your RSS aggregator every once in a while and chime in on the conversation, or even start one up. That's how I know if people are actually listening. Site metrics are one thing; actual, tangible involvement and engagement is another. How will I ever know if I got through to the 3,676 people that stopped by yesterday?
Without this vital interaction, this blog would have croaked months ago. As a sign of my appreciation, I will be making a post in the near future offering PaulStamatiou.com and PStam.com buttons. I ordered a few hundred but I'm not sure how many of you will respond. I don't want to charge but when it comes to sending out more than a hundred, it would be nice to see a dollar or so per button. Anyways, I will worry about that when the buttons arrive.
Until Next Year
Thanks for a great year. Spread the word about my site and hopefully come next September 8th I can blog about how I have more subscribers than TechCrunch. :-) Oh and the next few days will be a bit slow - I have a microeconomics test, an information design project proposal, an interactive story to make in Flash for an interaction design class and a ray tracing program to write for my computer graphics class. (psst - join my facebook group)