Happy Birthday, TBCM!

Well, this blog has officially just turned 2 years old today – at least according to Blog City, my blog host! I had a few blog posts over at Blogger before I switched to Blog City, but I might as well consider this the birthday for the blog. It's been an interesting two years. The first year or so was fairly slow as I didn't have a real focus on what I wanted to blog about. It was really anything and everything. If you look back in the archives, many of the entries are pretty short, especially considering the mammoth posts I tend to write often these days! Things really started getting cooking last August after I posted an article that garnered a ton of traffic. That was a comparison between my T-Mobile Sidekick and the Treo 600 that a friend had sold me. I found that I really enjoyed writing in-depth reviews, and have done this at least a couple more times with a review of the Humax DRT-800 and another comparison review of two GPS navigation programs for the Treo, Mapopolis NavCard and TomTom Navigator. Last September I was picked up by a new venture called Project DU that is part of SBC. They selected a group of bloggers to sponsor and syndicate as the default feeds in their custom built "Project DU Blog Reader." Project DU "hired" me to blog about gadgets and tech, and so that has definitely been my focus over the last nine months. Of course I will occasionally rant about something regarding health and nutrition, or other random topics as they may strike me, but for the most part Twelve Black Code Monkeys is now really mostly a tech blog. Along the way I also got my own domain name for the blog so that instead of being at http://twelveblackcodemonkeys.blog-city.com, I can be accessed at the slightly shorter http://twelveblackcodemonkeys.com.

I want to specifically thank the guy that got me into blogging in the first place, Eric McErlain of Off Wing Opinion. I still remember at some party him mentioning to me something about his "blog" to which I dumbly replied "huh? What is that?" This was back in 2002, and I felt ashamed for not knowing about this incredible phenomenon that even then blogging had become when I considered myself somewhat of a guru when it came to the internet – having first gotten involved in grad school back in the early 90's. I also want to thank all of those in my Friends section of my blogroll (to the right), who I've gotten countless ideas and help from over the last couple of years!

What does the future hold for Twelve Black Code Monkeys? I really don't know! Part of that I guess is up to you! To those who read this blog (or even those just visiting for the first time), I ask you how can I make this better? Would you rather I tone down on the length of my entries and concentrate on providing a greater number of articles about different things? What other subjects outside of those I've been a bit obsessed about recently would you like to hear about? I already know that the layout of my blog is not optimal. Blog City is about to come out with a new version, and so I have been waiting for it before I try to redesign anything, but I do plan on doing some redesign soon, making things easier to read, less cluttered, etc. In the mean time, of course, if you haven't been doing this already, you can always look at the plain text of my entries via your favorite news reader.

Oh, I guess I should also thank you, my readers! While it's nice to just write and get things off my chest, or share some cool stuff with a few friends and family who I know read my blog, it's awfully nice to hear, especially when I put tons of effort into writing something, that it's actually helping people out there. I've gotten a lot of great feedback on the reviews I've written, as well as a big piece I did comparing mobile data plans. According to my stats, I've gotten 369 comments, or more than one every other day over the last couple of years. It's also a little more than the 362… er, 363 blog entries I've written. Of course a bulk of them are concentrated in the very popular entries that I've mentioned above, but still! It's been great to know that I've done something that has helped others. It's also great to get feedback when I mess something up and assumed something I shouldn't have. You've definitely made this a much better blog by keeping me honest (and being awfully nice about it too)!

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