One Year Blog Anniversary

One year ago today I started A Large Regular. I had been blogging at SportsPages.com for over a year and thought it was time to claim my own piece of the web. The decision was hastened along by the upcoming presidential election, the war in Iraq and the realization that I had things I wanted to say about these topics and that SportsPages.com really wasn’t the forum for these opinions and observations.

At first I was very apprehensive about starting my own blog. The technology was new to me (I knew very little about HTML). A number of people had told me that Blogger was easy as pie to use and they were right.

Sure sometimes Blogger can be frustrating (I quickly learned to either write my stuff in word and copy and paste or make sure I copied what I wrote before hitting the publish button). I always try to remember that Blogger is free and that I shouldn’t complain - but that is easier said than done.

When I first started A Large Regular I was mostly focused on the Red Sox, the presidential race, the war in Iraq and just the regular miscellaneous stuff that draws my interest. I also started out by trying to do little snippets about the different countries in our world. I did this as a means of self education. I tend to remember things better if I write them down (Mike Ganis tells me that another secret to remembering things is to whisper what you want to remember to yourself). I enjoyed learning about different countries but the events of the day quickly took over and this little exercise in self betterment fell by the wayside.

Now that things have quieted down (so to speak), I think I again will resume this practice of looking at the different countries if for no other reason than I enjoyed learning new things.

Over the course of the year, I have seen the number of daily visitors steadily increase. When I first started, getting 100 visitors in a day was a great day. Now I get about 200-400 per day (hopefully this upward trend will continue).

I have had over 166,000 visitors to the site and I do admit to some sense of satisfaction to this number. However, I don’t kid myself. I know that the majority of the hits were due to others linking to something I’ve written and without these links I probably would be still toiling in complete obscurity instead of the relative obscurity I find myself in.

Key to the number of hits were several “Instalanches” from Instapundit. For a blogger that has to be the ultimate. I remember the first Instalanche clearly. One night it occurred to me that the John Kerry Campaign seemed to be having a mis-step every single day. I looked back at the month of August and detailed a month full of missteps (except for August 12th) and sent the link off to the professor. He liked it and linked to it and my stat counter started going through the roof.

I remember just watching the stat counter. I couldn’t refresh fast enough to keep up with it. As my luck would have it, my first Instalanche came on one of Glenn’s busiest days and I got over 10,000 hits from the experience.

For a blogger there is nothing like the feeling of having something you’ve written being judged “linkworthy” by another blogger. I’ve been linked by Instapundit, American Digest, Hugh Hewitt, Betsy’s Page, Baseball Musings, NRO, Baseball Crank, Offwing Opinion, BostonSportsMedia.com, and many, many more (each link of which I am extremely grateful for and humbled by).

Probably most importantly, I feel like I have made some friends with my blog. I look forward to having beers with Gerard on the West Coast, Bill in Ohio, BST and Eric in Tennessee, the other Eric in DC and so many more folks who have been kind enough to make this site a regular stop.

Finally, I would like to thank Sports and Bremertonians who were the first to add me to their blogroll. I have always appreciated that. I have also tried to keep that feeling in mind and have tried to be as generous with linking to new blogs as Jeremy and David were when they linked to me.

Going forward I will try to keep my posting here at A Large Regular interesting, informative and hopefully humorous. I will also continue to post at SportsPages.com (although to be honest most times those posts are day old A Large Regular offerings). In addition, Gerard Van der Leun at American Digest has graciously asked me to contribute to his site on matters of sports and I expect to contribute during the summer to the web site for Die Hard (a Red Sox geared publication).

Thanks so much for visiting A Large Regular. I promise to provide more cowbell at the same great price!