Ijust realized that yesterday was my one-year blogoversary, which meansI’m now entitled to post the self-congratulatory one-year blogretrospective. Funny that a little more than a year ago, I’d neverwritten anything in a public forum. Now, 472 posts and a little over 2 millionhits later, here we are. And it all started from this…

Actually, the way I got into blogging is sort of funny (well, to me anyway). Igot started reading blogs because of BrianJackson. I’d been an avid reader for a couple of months butdidn’t write anything because frankly, I didn’t think I hadanything to blog about. Around that time, I was trying to convince thepowers-that-be to let me go to Chris Sells’ XML DevCon. The deal westruck was that I could go, but I’d have to do something to communicatewhat I learned there back to the members on my team. I thought, what the heck,I’ll blog my conference notes so everybody back at the ranch could readabout all the cool stuff I was hearing about.

I went to the conference and took copious notes, and posted them to a temporaryproto-blog up on Blogspot. The first night of the conference, Chris sent outsome mail asking for anybody who had been blogging the conference.  So, ina burst of hubris bolstered by a couple of free conference beers, I sent Chris alink to my notes. A couple of days later, Chris posted an aggregated list ofconference-related blogs up on his web site. Suddenly, there was a link to mywork up on http://www.sellsbrothers.com,and that was about the coolest thing ever. Had it not been for that link, Iprobably wouldn’t have kept up with the blog after the conference ended.So thanks, Chris J

Over the last year, I’ve found that I really enjoy blogging. I’vealways loved technology and always like writing, and blogging lets me combinethose two things into something I find I really enjoy doing. Hard to believeit’s been a year already – I doubt that I’ll be stopping anytime soon.

Here are my top five personal favorite posts, in no particular order:

• Unusual Inspiration
• On the Etymology of Kool-aid Drinking
• Indigo and Star Trek
• Music History (on iTunes and album-as-art)
• Transports, Channels, and the office mailroom
• XML and comparative religion

Ok,that was six. I’m done now.