Six Candles

I got busy this week and didn't get around to noticing that this blog's sixth birthday passed on Monday.

I always have to eat crow about that first post, since Ted's Montana Grill has been a modest success; our downstairs neighbor's parents treated us to dinner at their Lexington store last fall, which does a Bennigan's/Ruby Tuesday casual dining niche with a national park lodge ambiance. We haven't been back, but there are a lot of places competing in that niche here in town.

I went from obscurity to B-list blogger back to relative obscurity in those six years, and my readership has gone down from about 120 or so a weekday at its steady peak around 2004 to about 70 a weekday today; I might have gotten some Instalanches in the early days and some nice traffic flows from Steven den Beste in his prime, but the non-post-link driven traffic never got too far over 100 on a weekday. I seemed just a notch away from something special, as peers found their way onto C-SPAN (I recall seeing Mike Krempasky from Red State and could say "I beat his team in the Blogger Bowl fantasy football league last week.") and the Washington Post, but that wasn't to be my lot in life.

The decline these days might be due to the large number of good blogs out there; there are no barriers to entry in this game and people only have a finite amount of time to read. Also, life intervenes; I'm putting more effort into my teaching and have something of a social life, so the number of good think pieces coming out of here seems to have fallen.

However, the few dozen regulars here have been a blessing, a group that helped see me through the three years in the wilderness from 2004-2007, where I was unemployed, helping my wife through a bout of depression and fighting off having a bout of it myself. With your help (and the help of a lot of a lot of people in "meatspace" as well), I'm back in academe, settling into what seems to be a nice niche here at Sullivan U; they're already talking about my schedule for spring term here, which will push me past the one year mark and require a contract renewal.

What will the next six years bring? Maybe a kid or two to look after, a solid college teaching career
and continued interaction with a lot of interesting people from around the world, from Canadian curmudgeons to Welsh pastors to Washington insiders to old friends from both blogspace and meatspace, as well as dozens of others that have been blessings for the last half-dozen years. For some reason, I took down my link list a while back; I was too busy to edit it and too much a purist to leave up stale links; that should come back in the next few days.

I may take a day or two off now and then, which I rarely did when I first got started, but this is part of my life. I don't see it going away anytime soon; I have too much of a community going here to walk away.

Comments

[Richard Hall]

Congratulations! Here's to the next 6 years.

[Lee Anne Millinger]

Congratulations, Mark! I am happy to be a longtime member of the Peanut Gallery.

[davie d]

Happy blog birthday, Mark.

[BD]

Six years!:^) Blog on eh?

[ganns]

Six years and as relevant, fun, and thought-provoking as ever. Congratulations!

[Matt Brown]

Happy bloggy birthday, Mark. Hope you stick around for a long time.

[Jason]

Congratulations, Mark, on six years of consistency and excellence!

[Kevin Holtsberry]

Congrats, Mark. Hard to believe it has been that long. I for one am glad you are still around. I have had quite the ups and downs this year and have experienced similar things with my various blogs as you have.

We will have to get together for lunch or dinner again sometime.

[Patrick Carver]

Congrats!

I do want to give you a "thanks" since you were one of the first to notice my blog nearly 6 years ago (dang! that long ago?).