Five years ago today, at this very hour, I blogged the fateful words: “This is a test.”
Okay, maybe the words themselves weren’t so fateful. But that was my first-ever blog post, and it’s hard to believe it’s been half a decade. Yet here we are, on my fifth blogaversary.
Excessive amounts of navel-gazing — and a nifty colorful chart! — after the jump.
Two days after my initial “test” post, I blogged something more substantial, explaining the nature of “my new ‘blogger’ journal” (I didn’t quite have the terminology down yet) and thanking “Andrew Long, my conservative friend, for guiding me toward the joys on blogging.” Almost four years later, Andrew would joke about this in his Best Man speech at my wedding:
Heh. Anyway, back in that same April ‘02 post, I promised that the ease of blogging would allow me to “actually keep my website fresh, with updates at least every couple of days.” LOL! Little did I know. Since April 4, 2002, I’ve published 14,927 blog posts, of which 12,763 were actually authored by me. (The remaining 2,164 were either by authored by guestbloggers or auto-posted by CNN.) For those keeping score at home, 12,763 posts over five years translates to approximately 213 posts per month, 7 posts per day, or a post every three-and-a-half hours. That includes sleeping hours (though I don’t believe I have actually blogged while sleeping…yet).
When it first started, the blog had a very limited audience, and very few commenters. But as the traffic has grown, so has the comment section, to the point that comments now outnumber posts by a ratio of roughly 7-to-1. In its five years, the blog has received 104,852 comments (not counting deleted spam).
And what about traffic? I’ve received 2,186,665 unique hits since July 11, 2003, according to SiteMeter, and 41,855 hits before that, according to my old counter, Estats4all. That adds up to a total of 2,228,520 hits (though that may be a couple of thousand too high, as I believe Estats4all’s total dates back to my pre-blog website).
If you told me, five years ago today, that my all-time hit count would someday top two million, I’d have been pretty stunned. Likewise if you’d told me that Technorati (which didn’t exist five years ago, but nevermind that) would list my blog as having received 703 links from 149 blogs. Or that 87 of those links would have come from the “blogfather” himself, Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit. Or that my blog would someday be the subject of reportage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press… to say nothing of Wikipedia, The Week magazine, a Tucker Carlson interview and a Spike Lee joint.
What a long, strange trip it’s been. I still remember how excited I was when my website broke the 100-hits-per-day barrier for the first time ever. :)
Anyway, I promised a nifty colorful chart, and here it is: an annotated verison of Alexa’s traffic chart for my domain(s) over the last five years:
I don’t fully understand Alexa’s metrics, and there are some oddities, like the fact that my biggest non-Katrina traffic day ever, on January 4 of this year, doesn’t produce any visible “spike” at all (even on the six month chart), while certain much smaller traffic events can be clearly spotted. More generally, the recent traffic according to Alexa just seems too low — according to SiteMeter, I’ve been averaging around 2,000 hits per day in recent months, which is better than I was doing at some earlier times (like March 2006, when I was averaging around 1,300) that appear on Alexa’s chart to be higher than the present day. Of course, since Alexa’s measuring criterion is “daily reach” as a percentage of all Internet use, maybe the increase in overall Internet use over the last 12 months accounts for at least some of that apparent discepancy. Regardless, the chart provides an interesting and roughly accurate overview my site’s history.
But the most gratifying aspect of my blog’s growth over the past five years hasn’t been the ego boost of the raw traffic numbers (though that’s nice too), but the growth of a genuine online community here, regular commenters and lurkers alike. (It always surprises me how many “lurkers” come out of the woodwork when a particular issue of interest arises. I sometimes forget how much bigger my audience is than just the several dozen “regulars” who contribute frequently to the discussions, and when the lurkers pop up, it reminds me, which is another nice ego boost.)
At the risk of waxing overly nostalgic and sappy, not to mention self-aggrandizing, I think the BrendanLoy.com community is one of the more interesting blog communities out there, because of the fact that there is really no single tie that binds us together, if you will, except an interest — for a wide variety of reasons — in the content of this site. There are people who come here for the politics, people who come here for the sports, people who come here for the hurricanes, people who come here for the updates on my life, people who come here for the babes, boobs & sex. There are Republicans and Democrats, hawks and doves, neocons, paleocons, centrists, liberals, libertarians and libertines. There are people who hate sports, people who don’t really care about sports, and people who love sports. Among the latter group, there are USC fans and Notre Dame fans and LSU fans and Penn State fans and even the occasional UCLA fan, though I discourage that sort of thing as much as possible. (Just kidding.) There are dog lovers and cat lovers. There are 24 fans, and people who think 24 is the dumbest show on TV; same goes doubly for American Idol. There are devout Catholics and committed atheists. There are my classmates, former classmates, friends, family members, six-degrees-of-separation quasi-acquaintances, and random strangers I’ve never met and probably never will. And of course, there are people who like me, people who merely tolerate me, and people who think I’m a walking train wreck, and read this site for precisely that reason. The wide variety of viewpoints and perspectives means the debate, whether it’s on Iran’s nuclear program or USC’s football program, can get fierce and intense and sometimes downright rude — but it also means this place is never an echo chamber.
The diversity of views results, I think, from the fact that this audience didn’t coalesce around a particular ideology or a particular sports team or a particular viewpoint on, well, anything. It simply coalesced around me, hyperactive and A.D.D. blogger that I am, with each reader getting hooked in by something different. The result is a truly eclectic community the likes of which I’ve rarely if ever encountered elsewhere in the blogosphere. (Of course, I’m biased. I spend much more time on my own blog than on any other. But often times, political blogs in particular are basically collections of ideological fellow-travelers with a handful of diametrically opposed trolls thrown in. The distinctions here are much more nuanced than that.)
What does the future of The Irish Trojan’s Blog hold? I have no idea — this place has always evolved organically, not through some grand plan of mine, and I expect it will continue to do so. Will guestbloggers have a greater role as my free time decreases once I enter the working world? Will some future employer, somewhere down the road, put a crimp in my blogging style? What will be the “next big thing” bringing in mega-traffic to the site (e.g., the hurricanes, the Lieberman-Lamont primary, etc.)? Who knows? I just hope the next five years are as fun as the first five.
NOTE: Blog stats current as of 9:25 PM on April 3. I finished this post and went to bed then, rather than staying up to verify the exact numbers at 1:03 AM. :)
April 4th, 2007 at 1:54:16 am
Happy Birthday and congratulations. A story about college sports concerning a distant acquaintance of mine first led me here but it is the diversity you mentioned that keeps my interest. I don’t get to participate in the serious discussion much but I still love to read a lot of them whenever I can. The fact that very few commenters totally agree with each other makes all the difference. Everybody is forced to defend their position or concede their argument even if in absentia.
Here’s to the next five years.
April 4th, 2007 at 2:10:17 am
I raise my glass (Dalwhinnie 15yrs) to you . . . for your prescience with the storms, your hospitality, and for inspiring me.
April 4th, 2007 at 2:10:55 am
Congrats on the anniversary, Irish Trojan. Your blog is an inspiration to me and my humble blog. Gives me hope that I can have my page become just as successful as yours. Love that you love to do it and hope you continue for years to come.
April 4th, 2007 at 5:46:46 am
I don’t know how you do it. I got bored very easily.
Of course, you pride yourself on being “unique,” and where I became convinced that I wasn’t offering anything too terribly different from six bazillion other blogs, you clearly have a void to fill of . . . well, something. If Brendan Loy didn’t exist, we would have to create him, and all that weird six-AM psychobabble.
But hey, thanks for adding me to the blogroll, anyway.
And congratulations.
April 4th, 2007 at 8:03:51 am
Happy birthday! :)
April 4th, 2007 at 8:46:35 am
Congrats!
Texasyank…..mmmmm Dalwhinnie….the highest distillery in Scotland
April 4th, 2007 at 8:55:09 am
Happy Birthday! And here three years ago, all us 1Ls were making fun of “that dork with the blog.” ;)
April 4th, 2007 at 9:05:53 am
Yup… whereas now, it’s all the 3Ls making fun of “that dork with the blog.” So things have really changed a lot. :)
April 4th, 2007 at 9:10:36 am
Sweet! Got a mention above as a Penn State fan!
Just count me in as someone who “came for the hurricanes, and stayed for the sports”.
April 4th, 2007 at 9:17:54 am
I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before on here, but last summer, I worked as an associate at a large firm in Washington DC. For one of my assignments, I got to tag along with the real lawyers who were going to a strategy meeting with some other lawyers at another large, prestigious DC firm.
When we got there, they introduced me to the other firm’s lawyers and mentioned that I was a summer associate from Notre Dame.
Immediately, one of the other firm’s lawyers asked me:
“Oh, right, Notre Dame — didn’t one of your classmates leak the news on the internet that Bill Kelley was going to the White House?”
I was never prouder of my association with brendanloy.com than I was at that moment.
April 4th, 2007 at 9:19:15 am
Word on MSNBC is Iran will be releasing the British sailors at the end of a press conference taking place in Tehran right now.
April 4th, 2007 at 9:22:25 am
Here it is…
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070404/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iran_britain
April 4th, 2007 at 9:49:08 am
But where do I vote for Idol!!
April 4th, 2007 at 10:32:22 am
Congrats on the blogiversary. May the IrishTrojan universe continue its expansion throughout its impending move to the South.
Cheers!
April 4th, 2007 at 11:54:58 am
Congratulations! I’ve enjoyed.
April 4th, 2007 at 1:29:03 pm
Wow, can you actually hear me on that video? I completely lost my voice the night before the wedding, that totally sucked.
April 4th, 2007 at 1:52:17 pm
Happy blog birthday!!! I am one of the loyal readers now that started reading your blog during Katrina. I actually found it by accident and wish I could tell you who had you linked when I was surfing for Katrina info.
I have to compliment you though because in this day to stay committed to something for 5 years speaks volumes of your commitment to everything you do. Some blogs I’ve read are tiresome but never yours. I read it just about everyday to catch up on news, sports….life.
Hats off to you Brendan and I hope to still be catching up on things with your thoughtful narration 10 years from now.
April 4th, 2007 at 1:55:28 pm
Thanks for the congrats and compliments, everyone. See, this thread is another example of how the blog is a great ego booster. :)
April 4th, 2007 at 3:58:40 pm
Happy blogaversary! I’m one of those random strangers you’ll probably never meet. I too found the blog during Katrina (linked from Michelle Malkin’s site, if you’re keeping track), and stayed for the sometimes-strange-but-never-boring discussions.
Back to lurking now…
April 4th, 2007 at 4:03:23 pm
Brendan, Happy Blogiversary! Thanks for making slow work days go by faster, depressing days better, recording the memorable times in our lives and keeping me informed about what’s going on in the world.
April 4th, 2007 at 11:28:41 pm
Congrats IrishTrojan! What an achievement, to stick with the practice of blogging for 5 years is very impressive. You do a great job of maintaining and interesting, insightful, thought provoking medium. I found you on a local South Bend TV station during Katrina, and I have been a lurker (sorry for that) every since. I have started my own blogging attempts about 3 times and it has only added to my awe of how you maintain this site with the rest of your life.
Keep up the great work!
April 5th, 2007 at 1:27:06 am
Thanks Jeff, and no need to apologize for lurking. As I said, I always especially appreciate it when the lurkers come out of the woodwork, as you have here. If there were no lurkers, there’d be no one to come out of the woodwork! :)
May 8th, 2007 at 9:46:31 am
Cool site. Thanks!!!
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