Happy anniversary RetroHack.com

When Google auto-renewed RetroHack.com recently, it struck me that we’ve been publishing content for (as of tomorrow) a full year on this domain. While some of our content did come from the older networkplumbing.org site that I maintained on blogger, solo and inconsistently at best, the past year has seen some pretty consistent blogging, on some topics that (IMHO) have helped some, struck a cord with others, and garnered attention from still others. They also helped to preserve my sanity and sense of self-worth. Today I want to take just a moment to review the history of this blog and how it has grown over the past year. If you’d like to see how RetroHack came to be, and how the site has done, please read on.

The lineage of RetroHack.com

In the beginning there was cablejiggler.com and it was both fun and ugly. It had a certain GeoCities vibe to it, while being hosted on my desktop at work. Yes, Windows 2000, IIS 4, and a live ip.addr all the way to the desktop. In retrospect, all I can say is yikes. There was even my first attempt at a consulting business on this site for a time, but that died a death we shall not discuss further. </sigh>

Then there was mentat.ws. Part technical posting (before anyone had coined the phrase blog,) part personal site, it lasted from Delaware, through Florida, and into North Carolina.

Then came networkplumbing.org, both because I wanted to focus on a technology blog, and because .orgs were much cheaper than .ws, and the entire .ws DNS structure had become unstable. It was my first purchase through Google Apps, and was hosted on blogger.com for its entire life. I published content there in fits and bursts, but never really buckled down to it, mostly because there were too many other distractions, and blogger as a tool is severely lacking.

Then, this time last year, I woke up on the 2nd of September with the name retrohack.com in my head, checked and it was available, and that was that. It seems someone had it previously and let it expire, so I still have to deal with some search results, a few issues with Google apps, and a couple of other minor things, but on the whole, it is what it is, and I am really quite proud of it. It never worked on Blogger because of the previous owner, so I tried it on Tumblr and a couple of other host platforms until Gabriel turned me onto the beauty that is WordPress.

It’s all about the numbers

In addition to publishing content with a respectable regularity, we’re also churning out some impressive hit counts, with a fairly steady rate of growth.

While I don’t really follow Technorati, I am told that having an authority of 121 (at the time of this writing) is damned respectable.

And because I lurve the statistics, check out the widget in the side bar. I can’t believe I’ve written over 100,000 words. I’m sure all my English teachers from school would like to have a word with me, considering I never managed to turn in a paper with the requisite minimums. Sorry ‘bout that. With another ten posts in the pipeline and scheduled, we’ll be celebrating a milestone 200th post in another couple of days.

What the future holds

However, now that I am blogging semi-professionally, the number of posts here may decline slightly. I am going to play around with posting two articles a week on RetroHack.com, written either by me, Gabriel, or the occasional guest-blogger*, and I will continue to link to those posts I have on other sites. It’s the same content, though the snark level is probably going to be a little less. I hope you will click through to read those. If I can maintain two posts a week here, plus one to three off-site depending on the demand, I will be doing a lot more than I would have bet on this time last year.

*Interested in writing content for RetroHack? Use the contact form linked above and get in touch. This blog was never intended to be a solo or duo effort, so if you are like minded, have some good stuff to share, and dig our style, we’d love to hear from you. No, we don’t pay for content, but consider the fortune and glory that awaits you, and the publishing credit looks good on the ol’ CV.

To my co-hack extraordinaire Gabriel, to my readers, followers, and subscribers, I have to say that we’ve come a long, long way together, through the hard times, and the bad. I have to celebrate you baby, I have to praise you like I should, and thank you for sticking through this with me. There is much more to come.

Direct link for RSS and email subscribers…hhttp://youtu.be/LiXg_70rMeM

Thanks again to all of you who follow us on Twitter, subscribe to our RSS or email feeds, link to us, or just drop by to read and comment. I started this blog for my own sanity, and am thrilled that it seems to be worthwhile to so many others too.

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