I’ve done my best to resist celebrating arbitrary milestones in this blog. I silently hit my 100th post a while back, as well as various fractions of a year. However, you’ll have to excuse my pride now as The Quixotic Engineer is one year old today.
For the curious, here’s a chart of my RSS subscription growth over the last year. The first big peak was the day my Gmail spam post was linked by Lifehacker, and the count has been steadily growing ever since. The occasional sharp valleys are days when Google Reader didn’t publish a subscriber count.
Writing this blog has been rewarding in ways that I really did not expect. The most obvious benefit is that my writing ability has significantly improved through frequent practice. I’ve also had a chance to learn a great deal about web technologies, such as PHP, JavaScript, XHTML and feed syndication (RSS.) Furthermore, I’ve worked with some great open source applications, such as GIMP, Audacity, and WordPress.
More importantly, I’ve had a chance to get to know some really interesting people. Blogging is largely a social activity, and I think that getting to know fellow bloggers with similar interests is the best part. Many thanks to Michael, Nav, Leigh, Mitch, Dan, Ben, Corvus, Daniel, Dave and Tim for all the stimulating and thoughtful conversations and debates.
Thank you to all my other (quieter) readers as well. It’s very edifying when someone likes your writing enough to stick around. I’ll do my best to keep writing quality posts in the future. One year down, here’s to many many more!
June 30th, 2008 at 1:39 am
As a newcomer to the group of bloggers you’ve listed, I have to say that I’m grateful for how quickly you’ve all absorbed me into your community. I completely agree that finding like-minded people has been the most rewarding part of this experience.
Congratulations on a year, and keep up the good work!
June 30th, 2008 at 5:21 am
Congrats on an excellent year and here’s to many more!
June 30th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Congratulations! I’m also a new blogger and I find it is quite an interesting “hobby”. Keep up the good work.
Question: How did you get that graph?
June 30th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Thank you everyone!
@Dan: Glad to have you, your insightful perspective adds a lot to the discussion.
@IllegalCharacter: I generated the graphs using FeedBurner. I’ve been enjoying your blog as well, it always gives me motivation to break out my Linux box and start messing around with it.
@Nav: I’m glad, because I usually try to write with a semi-technical audience in mind. If you can’t explain something in simple terms then you don’t really understand it. I look forward to your gaming posts!
June 30th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Congrats Matthew! I know I’ve enjoyed reading your blog over the past year or so and I’ve also appreciated the feedback you’ve left on mine. I’ll admit, some of your posts are a bit over my head – I’m a ‘techie’ in spirit only – but I do read them and try and glean something from them. And I think you’re writing has always been great – it’s very clear and precise.
I just added some of the bloggers you’ve listed here to my feeds. I haven’t written anything about gaming for a long time but it’d be good to read some smart stuff about it again. Thanks!
Looking forward to more great posts!
June 30th, 2008 at 11:33 pm
Happy 1st birthday to The Quixotic Engineer!! All the best to you, Matthew, and congratulations on 100+ posts and 365 days of life in the blogosphere. You were one of the first people to encourage me when I started, and I’ve always been grateful for your continuing support.
Best wishes, and I look forward to continuing to read your posts for a very long time to come!
July 1st, 2008 at 11:37 am
I would post a picture of a cake if I knew for sure I’d do it right.
July 1st, 2008 at 8:07 pm
@Michael: Thank you, that means a lot to me.
@Mitch: I should look into adding a “preview” button to my comment section, it would let people know if their html was going to work.
+ Congratulations to both of you on your recent GSW feature!
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Nice, I will have to check out Feedburner. I’ve never really looked into the subscriber stats for my blog, makes me wonder how many people actually read it regularly.
July 14th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Hey man, late to the party but grats on 1 year of blogging! Keep on being that phantom editor constantly making me slap my forehead in shame!*
* – “constantly” meaning whenever the hell I bother to write a post. ;-)