This Blog Is Six Years Old Today

The first post of this blog. -Source

Six years ago, after much procrastination, I finally made the plunge and started this blog. 


For the First three years of this blog's existence, I had to make do with being on dialup at home, which made watching videos a tricky affair that involved hitting play on the video, then pause and wait for the buffer to fill. It often took 20 minutes to watch a 5 minute video. Uploading videos was very time consuming. 


During the early days of 2005 and 2006, I would often stop by the library in Haywood Co or Jackson Co on my way home from work and manually download webpages and blogs to several 3 1/2 inch floppy disks (you do remember what those were , don't you?) and bring the take home to read and use as source material for my posts. At some point, I upgraded to a thumb drive that held 256 MB, then successively larger ones until finally, in March of 2008, Verizon Internet Services made DSL available at my home. Then, it was Katy bar the door. That year, I made 1,582 blog entries in my exuberance. I probably would have kept that pace up if not for my adoption of Twitter. I've made 30,029 tweets on my main account at @ThunderPig in the 1,028 days since July 20, 2008. 


I've gone from covering events with a 3 Megapixel still camera and a video camera that shot at 320x240 QVGA resolution to a 12 Megapixel still camera and a video camera that shoots 1280x720 HD...although I use 640x480 VGA for longer events. 


When I first started, my main computer had 512 MB of RAM, a 6 GB HD and ran Windows 98. My Internet Connection topped out at around 21 Kbps...it never reached the advertised 28.8 Kbps speed. Now, most people have cell phones that are more powerful than that.


I've managed to stay on the Blogger platform for the whole 6 years, although I have looked at Word Press and found it less than satisfying, and not as robust or versatile as Blogger. The severe service interruption this past week has had me seeking to host this blog on my own server space as soon as I can make the arrangements, and am confident that it will work as planned. Since I am a conservative, soon probably means that the process may take a year or so. LOL


I've met a lot of people through my work on this blog. Some of them have been political allies, others have been political opponents and that has been fun. The people who have given me the most grief have been putative allies, which has been no small frustration for me. The circular firing squad has been alive and well in the Republican Party...although I have noticed that the ones who've caused the most trouble seem to be former Democrats...I'm just saying...


Without the encouragement and support of people who read this blog, I probably would have moved on and be doing something else right now. The readers have been generous regarding hitting the donation link on my sidebar and in person, and I enjoy meeting people who read this blog. I love it when people come up to me and say, "Are you Thunder Pig?" Lately, I've been involved in trying to teach others how to do some of the things I do and how to use social media in conjunction with conservative activism. That has been as fun as blogging has been. 


I've been struggling lately to post on more philosophical content because of the distraction of twitter and the amount of time that editing video of local government meetings is consuming. Since this is a year in which things begin to heat up in anticipation of the 2012 elections, I expect no relief there this year or next. I'll just have to learn to cope or get out of the kitchen. 


Here are some stats regarding how many articles I've posted each year on this blog since I've started:


2005.........96
2006.......470
2007.......753
2008.....1,582
2009.....1,025
2010.......651
2011.......158 


I have been real slacker this year. Only 158 posts in 133 days. I'll try to do better.


The world has changed much in the intervening 2,191 days between Day One of this blog and now. I can't help but wonder how much more it will change in 6 more years.