gor[b] Paul Gorbould: Words and Pictures

Gor[b] 1 year anniversary

It occurs to me that it was a year ago this month that I began this foray into blogging. Every blogger I know marks such anniversaries with some sort of lame lookback or "clip show" of their highlights and lowlights - I'm not going to bore you with much of that, but I will pause a moment, then move on.

My first actual blog post came on June 18, 2006, on an anonymous test blog I created called Chairman Mayo. Not much came of it, though it did launch my uneasy fascination with gazillionaire chairman Mayo Shattuck III. (Congratulate him too, I see he followed my lead and got his own web domain too. Once I build a nuclear reactor, look after Bin Laden's money and marry a cheerleader, we'll be even.)

Chairman Mayo lasted exactly three posts, after which time I realized there was no point in trying to maintain anonymity, and I stepped into the light under my own name. My first real blog post was on July 11, 2006, a piddly entry called "Does every blog start with 'Welcome to my blog?'"

There have been some interesting steps and missteps along the way: pissing off a Web 2.0 guru on day 10, switching to WordPress, co-authoring the CBC Blogging Manifesto, hammering out a few obits, spoofing my employer and blogging about toilets.

And here I am, exactly 200 posts later - better than a post every other day, which isn't so bad, plus another 76 posts for Inside the CBC. Also (though you'd never know it thanks to Akismet spam filtering) some 20,936 spam entries aimed at my blog comments fields. Check the ratio on that: more than 10 bits of crap targetted at every one bit of crap I crank out.

Another number that I appreciate: 483 legit reader comments, more than two per entry. I want to thank everyone who took the time to say their bit - they'll never admit it, but you have no idea how badly bloggers crave comments and feeback to justify their time expenditures. Thanks very much, and keep them coming.

Oh, and I still boast the tidy number of posts read by my wife: zero, and holding. That's probably a good thing too.

Here's to doubling all those numbers for next year, including the last one.

On that note, I'm hoping to pick up the pace a bit over the next few weeks. I've got a dozen ideas in draft form, and I'll be reintroducing a number of regular features I created in the early days of this blog. I'm kicking that off with a week-long series called "CBC Signage of the Apocalypse." Should be good fun. Thanks for reading!