12 Months Of Madness - 08.24.98

OK, so here it is. One whole calendar year has officially came and went since I put this site up. At that point in time, I simply started it as a place where I continue to put writing once in awhile, hoping that I could keep my skills (what skills?) polished up and possibly even improve them a little. I know that I promised to update the site every week back then, but knew that at some point, I would probably have to miss that deadline either due to a writing block or some other fiasco.

The promise of updates was a public one, but even that was even more for me than it was for whomever would be seeing my site. In the back of my head, I knew that not many people would actually ever see the site (a majority of those being people I knew), and even less would come back a second time. The update was more of something that would keep me on my toes. It was a rough goal to shoot for, to hopefully keep me motivated to write something every week.

During the first month or so of the site (and before the hit counter got funked beyond all belief), I checked the site on almost a daily basis to see how much that little number would go up. I went without a guestbook for a long time, hoping that if anyone had anything that they really wanted to say, they would simply drop me an e-mail.

Which I did get. It wasn't an amazing amount of e-mails (probably an average of one comment every 2 weeks), but I got them nonetheless, and for some reason, it was enough for me. Eventually, I went the guestbook route, and even though the signee's come in fluctuations, it's a nice reminder that a few people have checked out the site and (gasp) even possibly liked something that they read.

In the past year (and you can check it), I updated the site at least once a week. For awhile, I fell behind on both the movie and music review sections (which is strange, because I buy so many CD's), but there was always at least one new piece of writing per week. So now, the site has over 200 pieces of writing spread across the three sections. The quality of the actual pieces is up and down, but the actual process of writing was always what I was more concerned with.

The content of the site is something that has always been fairly easy to explain. There are the movie reviews, the music reviews (although the page also contains a few interviews and best of lists), and the whatever section that is intended as a big catch-all for anything else I feel like putting up.

Although I don't put much time into the design and graphics on the site (and isn't that easy to tell), I have had some fun coming up with the splash page graphics over the past year. They haven't changed very often, but I've tried to be fairly original with them (as well as incorporating some humour). I think that I got more comments about the little kid rollovers than I did about any of my writing. Sad but true.

So now that the first year is done (which is about 6 years in dog time), what is going to happen? The truth of it all is that probably nothing will change for awhile. I've been kicking around some ideas for change, but I doubt that anything will come to fruition until I decide to spend less time doing other things, and put more time into the site. I will eventually be putting up the obligitory links page at some point, as well as some other random things at will.

So, if you've read anything in the past year and had any sort of feelings about it at all (even if it was extreme dislike), I thank you. If you are actually one of those people who enjoyed something, tell a friend the address of the site and come again.

back