It's been a year!!!!

It was a sultry Saturday morning, July 18, 2009. After recent discussions with my cousin when the wife and I were back home, I had decided to re-start my Livejournal blog that had been moribund for at least a year, if not longer. After two posts, though, I got to thinking. My Livejournal page looked boring. Plus, I had signed up for a Blogger account a *long* time ago but had never done anything with it.

So why not start completely over and see what I could do? I was bored on this Saturday morning, the wife wasn't up yet and I wasn't in the mood for video games. My thoughts were coalescing around a blog idea, and I decided this was the time to do it. After doing some basic Blogger design work, I did my first post!

Not exactly the most exciting post, but I figured what the hell? Why not start basic and move on from there?

Now here we are, exactly one year later, and 447 posts in as well. I honestly thought I would give up after a couple of weeks, because that is what I do. But I was able to persevere. There were times I did so by just posting links to my favourite videos (Mystery Science Theater, Monty Python, what have you). But I did it.

I have a fair group of followers, plus I'm sure there are others that I don't know about (I still have no idea how accurate the Feedburner stats are, considering how much they fluctuate). I've "met" some beautiful people on here.

I've made some great blogging friends along the way, been a guest-blogger three times (I have no idea of the readership on any of those posts, but they were still fun to do), started blogging about video games on the Game Informer magazine site, and gone through the crises of confidence that is typical of me when I do something like this.

But I'm still here. Maybe not posting quite as often as I had planned earlier (I had wanted it to be an average of once a day over a month's period, but I'm falling off that pace right now), but I am here.

Heck, I've even been insulted by somebody! You know you've arrived when *that* happens!

I've helped hundreds of people discover who unfriended them on Facebook (assuming that the number of people who left my blog to go to the site where the GreaseMonkey script is were able to figure it out), talked about my passion for social media as well as video games and books.

I've (hopefully) made people laugh, made others cry, inadvertently pissed some friends off (don't worry, we got better) and just generally had a lot of fun. I've also discovered some cool new things that I would never have known about if I hadn't entered the blogging world.

I've learned a lot doing this, both about others and about myself too. Post #500 will be coming up soon, and I do plan on doing something special for that. What that will be, I don't know, but I hope it will be good.

I couldn't have done it without all of you, though. So thank you so much. There are times where I begin to doubt myself doing this. Inevitably, and luckily, those are the times where somebody pipes up and says "I read you every day!" and my day is made, not to mention my blogging. It does keep me going at times.

We all need that little boost up occasionally, don't we?

Here's to another great year. I know I'm looking forward to it.