December 27, 2003

Belated Weblog Anniversary

The wild and wooly Christmas shopping season is my excuse for missing TAM's 4-year anniversary. On 12.11.99, your humble weblogger uploaded his first post onto a bit of free space on Angelfire. I won't reminisce too much because it is only TAM's fourth birthday, and who gets all worked up about four years of anything (marriage excluded)? Oh, but those were the days. Weblogging by hardcoding HTML with plain old Notepad. Today, I have a fancy, schmancy CSS-based template (thanks Joni) and some spiffy software to make publishing so much easier (thanks MT guys). TAM's purpose was to force me to get in the daily writing habit. Ideally, it would lead to a paid writing gig or book project. That hasn't happened yet due to me having a poor ability to self-promote. A lesson I've learned from over four years of weblogging is just putting content on the Net isn't enough. There's too much other stuff out there competing for people's scarce attention. What I haven't learned is how to self-promote without looking (or feeling) like a linkwhore. Maybe I'll find my answer in 2004. I'll be sure to let all of you know.

I do want to thank all those who have linked to TAM over the years. More importantly, I want to thank all of you who read my screeds. Your traffic and feedback means that I'm writing more than the merely non-trivial. Thank you.