Wednesday, September 08, 2004
2 of diamonds
diamond geezer is two years old today. Who'd have thought? I'd certainly never have guessed that the site would turn out like this when I started two years ago. Then I had no comments, no photos, no links from other sites and no visitors. Now I have six thousand comments, three hundred photos, two hundred links from other websites and a sizeable audience. I've posted more posts than there are chapters in the Bible, written as many words as there are in half a Bible, and included eleven thousand more hypertext weblinks then the Bible ever had too.
Of course, there is a downside. I spend a suspiciously large proportion of my spare time blogging or, even worse, going out and doing things so that I can blog about them. And for what purpose? My daily audience is still small enough to cram onto just two bendy buses - even QVC has a larger audience than that at four in the morning. But it's not much of a downside. I'm not really blogging for an audience, I'm blogging for me, and the fact that people seem to want to read what I write and interact with it is just a bonus. A very pleasant bonus nonetheless, so thanks for being there.
Today I thought I'd celebrate my 2nd birthday by taking you back to a few of the highlights from the last 12 months of diamond geezer, just in case you're new here and missed them at the time. It's by no means a complete list, but then most of you have read everything already anyway. But hey, even I enjoy reading back through my archive sometimes, and I wrote the stuff in the first place.
Here are my five most popular posts over the last year, ranked in order of how many visitors they attracted:
1) geezer de jour (April 1)
2) leap day (February 29)
3) future Radio 4 (January 31)
4) 100 comments (June 30)
5) Princess Di poem (July 6)
Here are my favourite 'creative' posts during dg's second year:
• textmap (September 26 & June 20)
• Prince Charles birthday tribute (November 14)
• Lunar Government Astro-Immigration Control (January 15)
• re-designed flags (February 16)
• Dome of Doom (April 27)
• Un-sound spellings (July 9)
During the year I also visited all sorts of London places and events, so many in fact that I started a separate blog just to store all my London posts. I particularly enjoyed researching my special London-themed series - Cube Routes (December), Oranges and Lemons (January), Silver Jubilee (May) and Piccadilly (August). And let's not forget the Olympic Torch relay, Concorde's last flight, a couple of random boroughs, the odd flashmob (whatever happened to flashmobs?), future Olympic stadia, Diana's fountain, the ongoing story of Bow Road station and an awful lot of vanishing Routemasters.
You can expect more of the same but different over the next 12 months. I'm looking forward to it already. And, as a special anniversary treat for you me, I've revamped my A-Z of London webpage, (the link at top of my sidebar), based on material I wrote three years ago before diamond geezer was even conceived. Same content, updated format. Might be worth another look, even if only to see the first online seeds of how this all began.
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