Friday, February 4, 2005
Happy 1st Anniversary!
Quite good timing that I should be sick the week where I'm supposed to be having fun here celebrating the blog's first anniversary, ain't it?
Anyways, yup, one year ago today Matthew's Anime Blog -- so called because I couldn't think of a cool name -- was established on UGA's music school servers. I had been toying with the idea of anime blogging quite a few months before as I was a regular vistor to Nowhere and thought I might want to try it out myself. The precursor to the full-blown anime blog was a recurring entry called the "Anime Progress Report" on my personal blog (see this one from August 29th, 2003) where I would quickly go over what I'd been watching recently with perhaps a thought or two, no screencaps or anything.
Finally, I decided to add screencaps and blogged Twin Spica 12 (didn't fix the links for that entry so screencaps won't show) on main blog, then a few days later decided to set up the anime blog, covering Twin Spica, Figure 17, Kita e, Yumeria, and various other shows at first. And during that first period I had a letter grade system in place to rate shows that I eventually dropped. Things didn't really get organized until the Spring season started. See the site as it was on March 25, 2004 (minus images) through the Wayback Machine. In May, the sysadmin at the music school informed us that they were moving to a new server so all of us would have to find a new home (see the site as it looked May 6th, 2004).
Thank goodness Nyro graciously provided me with a new home quickly. I've been here ever since then so thanks! :) The spring season ended, and the summer shows began without any real fanfare until Elfen Lied started in late July, bringing a lot of new vistors and frequent commentors onboad. The next month a hacker attacked kumoko.net and brought it down. I lost some of my entries that I hadn't backed up and basically had to rebuild the whole site. I learned my lesson so I backup frequently now :)
And since most of y'all came onboard during the recent fall season I won't go into depth there, but I will say I was surprised at how much traffic grew here. I'm not that great a writer or blogger -- I'm not half as qualified as others to be blogging anime and especially to be making judgments about quality ;) Thanks to everybody that's visited over the past year and made all the long hours working on this blog worth it for me. Special thanks to the other bloggers who've supported me -- Jeff for linking to me first, the Sea Slugs! for Popotan and such, and all the others -- list is too long to go down and thank everybody individually here :) I've enjoyed it and I hope the second year of the blog will be just as great. There's a lot to look forward to and I'll try to keep doing my best here ;)
Posted by Matthew at February 4, 2005 4:53 PM
If blogs were harem anime characters, MAB and SS! would be twins on Futakoi ^^. It's been a blast growing our blog alongside yours, and of course we all owe a huge thanks to Jeff for helping us catch a little of his runoff traffic *bow*. Here's to many more great years of anime blogging!
Posted by Kabitzin at February 4, 2005 9:53 PM
Congratulations on your 1 year anniversary! Keep up the good work. I enjoy reading your reviews ;-)
Posted by Tensai11 at February 5, 2005 7:41 AM
Happy anniversary, Matthew!!
>>kabitzin: Nice yet scary analogy. ;p
Posted by Ten at February 5, 2005 2:54 PM
Kabitzin, I'd be interested to hear what twins you think we'd be, lol ;)
Posted by Matthew at February 5, 2005 4:06 PM
Take a poll of who the bestest looking and coolest twins in Futakoi are, and we can be those two =D.
I am partial to Sara & Souju, personally.
Posted by Kabitzin at February 5, 2005 7:05 PM
We're on the same page then. So I guess that would make me Souju and y'all Sara ;)
Posted by Matthew at February 5, 2005 8:00 PM
I am down with that =D.
Posted by Kabitzin at February 6, 2005 1:53 AM
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