a year of blog

I am going to cry. I am quite certain of it. I have just spent the past two hours working on my monumental "history of my blog" post. I was almost done, and I thought, "Hmm, I better save this as a draft really quick just in case something happens and all this work disappears." I clicked "Save as Draft," and went to another window to look a date up on my blog for reference. When I looked back down at the task bar, I saw those dreaded and unfinished words. "Cannot find ser..." Why, oh why didn't I copy it all before hitting that button?

Anyway, it is indeed the one year anniversary of this blog. So many things have happened in the past year that in many ways, it feels like a decade has passed. Life has been moving at such a rapid pace, and the people I've only really known a year I feel like I've known all my life. This day, as I have mentioned before, is also the anniversary of what, at one point, came to be known as the B-Unit.

In this one year, I've learned so much. About myself, about other people, about life, about God. Just so much. I feel like I've grown up at an exponential rate, but it's not the kind of growing up that makes me sad. I do wonder what happened to the days when I sat around and had to search for something to do with my time, and I wish sometimes that I could be a kid again. But I'm beginning to learn that no matter what's going on in my life, I'm still me. I've grown up to the point where I realize that growing up isn't necessarily conforming to the "real world," but it's living and not letting that real world encroach upon who I am.

I cannot bring myself to re-write the post that I lost to the evil blog-eating internet, but I cannot let every bit of my work be lost forever. Thank goodness I had some of the work drafted and saved prior to this mishap. So instead of the unabridged version, here is a brief history of my blog:

• I began this blog on 22 October 2003.
• Since then I have posted between 250-300 times. (My post counter hasn't updated for several weeks, so I'm stuck at 262.)
• To date, I have received over 2,374 hits, not including my own hits or the hits received before 27 January 2004, when I didn't have a data archiving service
• I have posted approximately 115 photos hosted at Photobucket.
• John Mayer has been mentioned well over fifty times.
• The single most searched phrase that has led people to my site is "heterosexual lover of rainbows."
• I have received the most referred hits from Another Social Casualty, Holly's blog.
• In May 2004, I changed the title and address of my blog from Back Porch Poet at http://backporchpoet.blogspot.com to Washed Up at http://washed-up.blogspot.com.
• On 27 May 2004, I launched the first blog design that I created completely on my own using the HTML and CSS skills I had gained by refusing to let my blog be. (This is design 8 in the chronology.)
• I have significantly altered my blog's appearance a dozen times. This is blog design lucky thirteen.
• I host my new photos at Flickr.
• Those photos and my entire site are now under a Creative Commons License.

For those of you who'd like to see a visual history of my blog, you can click the links below to see all of my blog designs in chronological order.

1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 . 9 . 10 . 11 . 12

Here's to another year.