Today is the tenth anniversary of my very first blog post. It wasn’t really a barn burner: El Neil on the Iraqi Prisoners. With only two posts on the first day, it wasn’t clear that the blog would last even to the end of May. Eleven posts on the second day were a more hopeful sign. I’d been reading and commenting on blogs for a few years at that point, so the transition to being a blogger was relatively easy. Managing some kind of consistency — that was more of a challenge.

Becoming a long-term blogger just sort of happened: my friend Jon installed MovableType and invited me to start a blog of my own on his site. Jon eventually decided that blogging wasn’t for him so he shut down his blog, but allowed me to keep my blog hosted at his site for over five years as a primary and my first five years of posts are still available there. Jon’s short experiment in blogging was called Blogulatiousness, and I named my own blog as a back-handed reference to his … which is why I still have the least easily pronounced blog name in the Anglosphere. Initially, I expected the blog to be primarily quotations, although even from the start, I didn’t post a QotD entry all that regularly.

Advice for anyone wanting to start a blog? (Especially if you’re involved in the gaming-oriented Newbie Blogger Initiative this year.) Blog every day. Even if you don’t have much to say, make sure you post something. It’s dual purpose: you need to get yourself into the habit of posting regularly, and you need to have something new every time a reader loads your page, or they’ll stop coming back. I have a stockpile of QotD posts ready to go for those days when I’m too busy or too pre-occupied to come up with regular posts. I recommend you do something similar, although it should be something that ties in with your general theme (if you have one): original artwork, YouTube videos, quotations, short poems or drabbles if you write fiction, historical photos, a list of assorted links, etc. But do remember that a blog isn’t Instagram or Tumblr or Facebook: don’t post photos of your lunch. Please. You’re trying to build your own audience, and it’s unlikely you’ll do better than those services, as they’re optimized for their particular niches.

Whatever you choose to do, remember to link back to your sources every time. It’s courteous and it’s common sense: you want your work to be appreciated, and so do the other writers/artists/musicians you link to.

Earlier anniversary postings:

• Ninth anniversary
• Eighth anniversary
• Seventh anniversary
• Sixth anniversary
• (Very belated) Fifth anniversary
• (Premature) Fourth anniversary (a few days later, I welcomed my 150,000th visitor)
• Third anniversary
• (Belated) Second anniversary
• First anniversary

Update, 13 May: I just discovered that May 10 in 2004 was the same day that ArenaNet announced the development of their first MMO, Guild Wars (now known as Guild Wars Prophecies. I didn’t play the game until a year or so later, but I’m amused and pleased that we share an anniversary date.

Nine years is a very long lifespan for a blog. The vast majority of blogs don’t even make it to a first anniversary before the blogger loses interest and stops updating it. As I have no other particular claims to distinction, I’ll hang my hat on longevity. If I were to do it over again, I’d probably have come up with a different name for the blog, but for a spur-of-the-moment joke, it’s held up well enough. I guess.

One thing I don’t regret is not specializing in a particular area. I’m not an economist, or a military historian, or a political theorist, but I have interests in those areas that crop up relatively frequently here on the blog. I don’t generally post personal items, as there are lots of other venues (like Facebook) which are better suited to that sort of thing … and I live a fairly boring life, so exotic trips and exciting adventures are things I read about rather than experience directly. I especially don’t post about (past) employers or (current) clients in a way that they could be identified: that’s the sort of thing that tends to have only negative repercussions.

I did a retrospective round-up of the first year for the 2010 anniversary, the “best of 2005″ for 2011, and posts from 2006 last year. To stay on that path requires a look at what I posted in 2007 (and may still have some relevance or interest):

January, 2007

• QotD: Matching Wine with Food. Jennifer “Chotzi” Rosen exactly captures the highly imaginative food suggestions too many wine writers toss into their reviews.
• A close call. Winter driving in Canada can be unduly exciting when you least expect it.
• Close call, follow-up. Fixing the damage from the unscheduled off-road trip.
• An unexpected down-side to wine snobbery. Where I recount the new first-world problem of knowing too much about wine to order the plonk you are offered at too many restaurants (that is, terrible cheap wine at expensive wine markup).
• How does Symantec stay in business?. Symantec loses a customer.

February, 2007

• Declining to dine Roman style. I hate meeses to pieces.
• The tour went well…. A successful campus tour at Trent University. Victor only hit me once.
• Mississippi traps State Farm. When state governments overreach, companies respond rationally.
• Misunderstanding economics. Responding to a Toronto Star article by explaining the Broken Window Fallacy.
• Accounting and the military. “Jack Granatstein explains why the military budget numbers seem to come from another planet than the one we inhabit.”

March, 2007 (a very busy month, resulting in very low blog output)

• Our dystopian future?. “Brad Warbiany takes a moment to glance into his crystal ball and finds . . . shite”
• “Good job, buddy!”. An extended comment from a regular reader becomes a full blog post.
• Very disturbing development. “These guys are not exemplars of “warriors”. They’re parties to conspiracy and murder. That is not what soldiers do. The distinction may be a bit subtle for those raised on anti-war protests and anti-military propaganda, however. “

April, 2007

• Toronto to export garbage at retail level. The social and political side of garbage collection.
• The diet dilemma. The inevitable result of two trends: more sedentary adult life and cheaper food.
• Why have an army at all?. A letter to the Toronto Star suggests that Canada has no actual need for any armed forces at all.
• Everybody’s talking about it . . .. Some conversations just repeat on a regular basis. This discussion of how a criminal got his hands on the weapons he used in his crime could be copy-pasted into any month of the last decade.
• Somehow, I’m not convinced. A long-standing problem with using US college students as guinea pigs for sociological experiments is that they’re not truly representative even of Americans, never mind non-westerners. Your results will be biased due to the sample you’re using.
• Potential outages. Jon switched ISPs at the end of April. It took several days to get the blog up and running at the new ISP. An abortive effort was made to update to the then-current version of MovableType, but eventually he had to admit it wasn’t working properly and revert back to the older install.

May, 2007 (a death in the family meant another month of irregular updates)

• The Food Police. Another blog comment from “Da Wife” that grew to be a full guest post on the blog.
• Historical context, lack of, see Time Warner. If you want to use a historical event to make a point about something else, make sure you actually know enough about the historical event you’re referencing.
• Over-the-top iconography. Where we have to wonder what the heck the graphic artist and/or approving purchaser was thinking.
• “Pirates” fight to a 2-2 draw. The start of the summer soccer reports.

June, 2007

• How not to encourage foreign companies. A friend’s travelling tale of woe, showing how little has changed since the Cold War era.
• Bucket status: undefined. The job search and minor technical glitches of the moment.
• Why James Lileks won’t play. “Clearly the ability to soak up arbitrary complexity and incomprehensible names peaks at age 8. “
• Ontario under siege. The OPP and angry natives orchestrate a highway shutdown and perform some ritual Kabuki posturing. Foreshadowing the Caledonia confrontation, in hindsight

July, 2007 re-employment took its toll on blogging output

• New dog pictures. Pictures of early interactions between Xander and the new dog. We ended up adopting her and (of course) calling her Buffy.
• Daycare and the public interest. Always a hot topic of discussion among new parents. Always a hot potato for politicians as their mouths want to promise what the public purse can’t actually deliver.
• Raising fears of terrorism to fight terrorism?. Some things never seem to change.
• More on framing the war on terror. The usefulness or lack thereof in various government responses to terrorist threats.
• Home sweet (demolished) home. I was upset to discover that my childhood home was going to be one of thousands to be levelled in a massive redevelopment in Middlesbrough.

August, 2007

• Trains to Burlington. The long tale of moving a model railroad layout from Brooklin to Burlington.
• HTML markup accuracy. Amazing how much clarity a properly formatted superscript can provide.
• Public transit boondoggles. Once again, a topical issue as Toronto considers how to get all the subways, streetcars, light rail, and other public transit toys without actually footing the bill themselves.
• Fake volunteerism, overseas edition. The negative aspects of doing overseas volunteer work.
• Vikings trample Jets in exhibition game. The first of many mentions of the great Adrian Peterson (this was his first appearance in a game for the Vikings).
• And what else would you expect them to do?. The Canadian media still doesn’t understand or appreciate the military, but it’s actually better now than it was in 2007, as shown in this little post.
• Electrical gremlins. A follow-up post to the train layout post at the start of the month.

September, 2007

• Trains to Burlington, conclusion. The month-long tale of the model train layout comes to an end.
• Burlington Ribfest. After installing the layout, we took a side trip to the local charred meat festival.
• Amusing co-incidence. Being able to tell exactly when the satellite took a photo of your neighbourhood.
• Arctic Patrol Vessels: now with less sonar. An early warning sign that the APV contract would not go smoothly.
• Pirates finish out of the medals in playoffs. The end of that soccer season comes in pretty predictable fashion (including a default because we couldn’t get enough players to show up for a meaningless game).

October, 2007 (the job was consuming all my waking hours this month, so blog posts were very light indeed)

• There’s no place like Florida. There’s just something … special … about Florida.
• Voting day in Ontario. The election John Tory had to work really hard to lose. But he somehow managed the trick.
• Micro microeconomics. I explain “Russon’s Law of Economics” as applied to the Ontario economy just before the entire North American economy hit the skids. In hindsight, this was a flashing red light about the near-term performance across all retail sectors.
• The anti-age-effects movement. Rather than working toward mere longevity, put efforts into reducing or even eliminating the worst aspects of old age.

November, 2007 (deadline pressures at work kept blogging light)

• Outlook for Vikes-Chargers game today. I think it’d be safe to say that Vikings rookie running back Adrian Peterson had a pretty good game.
• A word to the Word-Wise. A cautionary word to those folks who have to depend on Microsoft Word for mission-critical tasks.
• This nicely explains it. The point where The Economist‘s drift towards advocating centralization and expansive government finally got me to let my subscription lapse. This was around the same time many UK bloggers were starting to refer to it as The Ecommunist.
• The real reason Ron Paul’s message is becoming popular. The cognitive dissonance of having a “Republican” who actually advocates for smaller and less-intrusive government.
• Canada cracks down on religious extremists. Well, some religious extremists, anyway. The kind that quote the Bible and all.
• Toronto council wastes money . . . in other news, water is wet. A rare link to the Toronto Star, and not for purposes of pointing and laughing.
• Go, Royson, Go!. The Toronto Star reporter fires back at the mayor who dissed his first article about council wasting money.
• Another good example of “spin”. Media gets report. Media spins report for maximum headline effect. Media then condemns the author of the report for hysterical over-hyping.
• Change your sexual orientation, get 10% off your flight. How not to advertise to minority customers.

December, 2007

• Victory is Mine!. A minor victory, admittedly. And the piper must be paid in the update.
• Another light blogging forecast. Toronto drivers. Snow. Do not combine these two elements lightly.
• Freedom of speech? In Canada, not so much . . .. Tip-toe past the word “censor”, or else!
• Attempting to excuse the inexcusable. Honour killings in western society.
• Velcro is not your friend. Christmas decorations. The joys of, sorta.
• Our Frankenstein connection. A bit of genealogical research leads to an interesting literary connection.

In the fast-paced world of blogging, where sites go dark in mere weeks or months, a blog reaching the venerable age of eight is a bit of an achievement (if only of persistence). Why do I still do it? Damned if I know … but if I haven’t published at least a few posts by mid-morning I feel like I’m slacking. It’s certainly not for the fame or fortune: it’s probably harder to become rich and famous through blogging than in many other fields, but to compensate it requires less talent.

Eight years ago, a fellow writer set up his own blog and invited me to set up my own blog on his site. Jon stopped blogging (far too soon, in my opinion), but allowed me to maintain my blog on his site for over five years and still graciously hosts the archives from that period. I probably wrote more and quoted less in the early days, but it’s now hard to remember what I did online before I became a blogger.

I did a retrospective round-up of the first year for the 2010 anniversary, and I collected the “best of 2005” for last year’s anniversary post. I guess this year requires a look at what I posted in 2006 (and may still have some relevance or interest):

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