Happy Blog-day to meeeeee!

One year ago today - December 22, 2006 - I huddled up in the shadow of a bus stop, cracked open a laptop, and wrote the very first post in the history of Da Blog.

At right is how it looked that first day. As you can see, it didn't look much different from how it looks today. Of course, the sidebar was a lot smaller and less cluttered than it is today, but if you look around, both of the elements on it are still on the sidebar and will probably stay there for some time in the foreseeable future.

For weeks I was the only person to see Da Blog. Slowly, the audience grew, and more and more people discovered what I had to say about... well... just about anything. Once, I got excited to see even one or two people read Da Blog in a single day. Last Monday, a whopping 25 visits were registered by SiteMeter. December 10 saw an incredible 45 visits.

Okay, so that isn't really all that much, SiteMeter counts my own recent visits, and none of you vote on my polls enough to properly justify them. Still, it's a great leap forward from even the summer. I've gone from just barely topping 100 visits a month in August and September to getting 100 visits in just the past week, and two straight months of over 300 visits. December has already topped November and it isn't even over yet; the 400 mark, once unfathomable, now looks like a certainty.

I suspect a big reason for the boom has been Da Blog's increasing emphasis on sports, especially football. (Specifically, I've noticed a lot of referrals from Google searches relating to the SNF Flex Scheduling watch. I'm the number 1 hit for "who will be flexed in week 17 of sunday night football". If you've come in for the answer for that question, I'll be live-blogging the Week 16 football day from my computer tomorrow.) With the college season proper over and the NFL season winding down, expect Da Blog to de-emphasize that in the first part of the new year. I hope to get back to taking care of my other projects, such as the 100 Greatest Movies Project. Later in the year, I'll have a new way of covering the elections. And if anyone has any other non-sports interests they'd like to see represented, that would be hunky dory as well. During the past year, I also launched a web site, which will continue to grow and change in the coming year, including the addition of several new sections.

I'm going to be starting 2008 in two new classes and hope to get better focused on my classes, something my football-related projects have been distracting me from, and also work to make sure I don't find myself kicked out of any classes, and thus kicked out of the university entirely. But I also hope to spend time in the second year of Da Blog to make it as memorable as the first.