I cross-posted this over on Hack Bend, as well: that blogger bash I wrote about? Yeah, it’s on for sure.

This Wednesday, April 30th, at The Summit Saloon and Stage in downtown Bend at 125 NW Oregon Avenue. Starts about 5:30ish and goes til whenever. Here’s the “official” description:

The first blogger meetup was a big success! Since then there’s been a lot of growth and new folks have popped up in our local “blogosphere”. Meetups like this are a nice chance for all of us to gather, unwind, and put some faces together with the blogs.

This event is primarily intended for bloggers who wish to meet other bloggers. If you don’t have a blog, then this may not be the get-together for you. So, if you just can’t stand not being there and don’t already have a blog… what are you waiting for?!

I’ll be there for sure. Will you?

Today I’ve been officially blogging for six years. Ironically, yesterday marked Chris’ five-year blogiversary. It’s going around!

Not much more to it than noting the date, except to bring up the imminent next blogger meetup.

Which will be this month, on the 30th—next Wednesday.

Shannon, Jen, BOR, and I are in talks to figure out where. (Stay tuned for further announcements.) So obviously the four of us at least are in. Who else is in?

Since I’m celebrating six years of blogging this month, I thought it’d be interesting to go back through the past six Aprils and link to some highlights.

April 2002 – Really not much to see here… I was just starting blogging, playing with the software I was developing, and it’s really just mundane stuff. I think Pong was a highlight.

April 2003 – Even less than in 2002. We saw Bon Jovi for the first time and there was more work on the software.

April 2004 – I was blogging up a storm. Pretty geeky stuff, an equal mixture of technical posts and non-technical-but-still-geeky posts and some random things. My musings for an A-Team movie first appeared, and—strangely enough—I first noted the use of the word “blog” on Law & Order.

April 2005 – I feel like I was hitting my stride in blogging style. A lot less of the technical posts and more… I don’t know, “general” posts? Fun posts? More of a mix of links, ideas, commentary, irony… Not sure if that’s the best way to describe them, but here’s a sample to judge for yourself:

• Superman is a dick
• Globe
• Sesame Street top 25
• Scrapple
• $40 a day
• Cougar! (and Cougar! The Return and Cougar! Reloaded)
• The Burger King creeps me out (with 673 comments!)
• Things about Bend that I miss

April 2006 – More of the same. I really think it was around 2005 and into 2006 that I found my “voice” and I don’t really cringe when I read those and later posts. You can see the seeds of Hack Bend being sown with this post (and I started Hack Bend the following month, in May ’06), and this post and this post still make me laugh. A lot.

April 2007 – I blogged a lot less—no kidding, right—but I prefer to think of it as “quality over quantity” in this case. My favorite for that month has to be this post, showcasing just how wonderfully twisted San Diego-area activities can be.

It’s been at the back of my mind recently that this month marks six years of blogging for me. I am of course talking about “official” blogging, with the software and reverse-chronology posts and comments and such—naturally I had web pages before 2002 but none of those were blogs.

Six years of blogging. April 22nd, 2002, to be exact, and since then I’ve spun out two other blogs (which lately have been getting far more attention from me) and written a crazy amount of words—exactly how many will have to be a topic for another post. But I keep thinking that this is some sort of milestone (since I missed the five-year anniversary) and that it should be celebrated somehow.

Shannon‘s organizing another blogger meetup this month, I believe, so maybe something in conjunction with that.

Thoughts?

Not a hangover in the literal sense, but it sort of feels that way because I’m not sure where March went and I’m sitting here looking at the calendar thinking, "Where the hell did April come from?" Like it’s already starting out with that thick, muzzy-headed pounding that you have with a hangover.

Seriously, what the hell did happen to March? St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, Spring Break… everything seemed off this year. I blame Easter. It was far too early. And Spring Break went by too fast.

And April… well, April. No, I don’t do April Fool’s Day; at least, not online. (Not really in real life, either.) I can’t stand April Fool’s Day online; I find it’s just an enormous waste of time. Look, it’s been done; I get it, ha ha, now move along, there’s plenty of other oddball and cool stuff to see online that’s for real.

See? I told you, March hangover: I’m coming across cranky as hell, fumbling for a brick of aspirin while gulping down coffee and squinting against the inordinately bright light.

Okay, I’m being too clever even for myself. More later with some real content.

On Thursday I was interviewed by Peter Sachs from our local paper the Bulletin for an article on the local blogging community, and today the article showed up—on the front page, no less! Here’s the link to the online version.

I didn’t get my picture in it this time (unlike the last time, a few years ago, that we bloggers were profiled), but—allow me to gloat a little—I did get the first quote. Which was a total surprise to me; I actually figured I was more incidental this time around, since there were a bunch of other people that were talked to before me.

On a similar note, I was invited by Anna Johnson, Public Communications Coordinator for Deschutes County, to serve on a media panel on blogging and the media late in April. I accepted, and as that approaches, I’ll probably have more to say on it.

Fun! Maybe there is something to this blogging thing after all…

I just flipped the switch on the new design for the site, and very surprisingly, things mostly went off without a hitch.

There’s still some unfinished things I need to, uh, finish, and I haven’t ported the design over to all the pages in the site yet… so you’ll still see the old green layout pop up from time to time, depending on where you go. And I’ll be fine tuning over the next couple of days too. A good rule of thumb is, expect it to be broken… til I fix it.

The main point of the redesign is to focus on the primary experience: reading the stuff I write. Without all the unnecessary crap elements getting in the way. There’s some of the advertising stuff going on too, because I’m not that pure.

Assuming you’re not just reading this in your favorite RSS reader, and are actually visiting the site, tell me what you think.

I promised to post fiction and get this blog "revitalized". I will! I’m working on it! It just got busy during the holiday time, as it tends to do.

Part of that revitalization is redesigning the site, cutting out the needless stuff and going with a more minimal design. Really minimal. Basically I want to get the focus on the content and make it as clean as possible. That means cutting graphics and viciously culling the sidebar down—dropping the Amazon link, the "Random Link", changing the archive presentation format, minimizing the Google ads impact, to name a few things.

(Oh, I’ll still have ads. Just less on this site, generally. I do like those graphic buttons for my other sites, Obsidian Stock and Pegasus Books—I created 3 of those 4 and I don’t get any revenue from them. Free advertising, baby. So those’ll stay.)

Plus I’m doing some stuff behind the scenes to make things work better. Tell the truth, I’m kind of getting sick of my own blogging system and coding, and I’ve considered switching it all over to WordPress and letting other people sweat the technical details so I can just write… meh. It’s a thought.

I plan to throw the switch on this new design on or around January 1st. That’s nice and symbolic, I think. Things should pick up from there.