27 March 04

Feathers of Hope Turns One

It’s our blogday!

In the pattern suggested recently by Coup de Vent, the leadup to the war on Iraq got us both reading widely on the blogosphere for the first time and prompted a curiosity about blogging. Moving from a daily logbook on paper to a more wide-ranging one onscreen seemed a little intimidating… but we had help.

First, Rebecca Blood’s excellent Weblog Handbook was very good at providing the big picture along with the mechanics. Fred of Fragments From Floyd and Lisa of Field Notes got us interested in the idea of doing a more collaborative kind of writing about place with their duoblog, Now Showing: Sunset and Clouds; the Ecotone Wiki grew out of this and continues to be a forum where folks can gather and talk, write about, and show photographs about place. Fernanda of The Chatterbox, a Brazilian who lives in Davis, was the first blogger we met in person (and remains the longest continual blogger we’ve met to date), and was encouraging and full of advice (obrigados, Fer). Chris Clarke of Creek Running North joined us and Lisa in Point Reyes for a broadcast program about place blogging (wonder whatever happened to that transcript?). Pica met Beth of Cassandra Pages last summer while visiting New England, and she’s as thoughtful and delightful in person as her writing is. The list goes on. Thank you to all who read, and come back, and leave comments. We hope to meet more of you in person, and see some of you in person we haven’t seen for, oh, 30 years or so.

A few stats:

Number of entries by category: Nature and Place 179, Design Arts 26, Politics 29, Baseball 33, other categories 82
Biggest pain: The comment spammers (less of a problem now since we’ve installed MT-Blacklist)
Weirdest success: Numenius’s innocuous review of The Da Vinci Code
Number of comments posted on said subject to date: 118
Number of Google searches for “Sangreal” that landed at the above post today so far: 12
Number of Achilles Tendons ruptured and blogged about during the last year: 2 (Pica and Keith Knight)

Posted by at 05:57 PM in | Link |
  1. Happy Blog Day!
    It is a delight to read your blog everyday Pica and Numenius. I have been following it since your first entry. So many interesting articals come up. Keep up the good work and I look forwards to another year of good reading. ( PS. I have recently started to take an interest in filming birds! )

    — Jennifer    28. March 2004, 00:18    Link
  2. ...and how many of us have you encouraged to start our own blogs? Me at least! Like Jennifer I come in daily so thanks for sharing part of your lives with us and it’s been great getting to know you again Pica after ..30+years! I’m waiting on the post in Spanish, Numenius.

    — Jenny    28. March 2004, 00:26    Link
  3. ...and many more! And many, many thanks for your efforts on the Ecotone as well, which will soon celebrate its first birthday. Get the party hats ready!

    — fredf    28. March 2004, 00:51    Link
  4. Are you suggesting that Achilles Tendons were really less of a pain than the spammers?! Yes, thank goodness for Jay’s MT Blacklist. I had several hundred last week alone!!!

    Congrats and thanks, Pica and Numenius, for getting up and running and for co-starting ECOTONE – all parts interesting and moving contributions to my blog life.

    — Coup de Vent    28. March 2004, 06:42    Link
  5. And hey, don’t forget: you dragged me in, kicking and screaming “No! It’s dorky!”—words I happily eat now, almost every day. I eat many more than I post, that’s for sure.

    — Doc Rock    28. March 2004, 07:39    Link
  6. Good going, you two! And what is that in blog years? Three or four, I should think.

    — Dave    30. March 2004, 10:17    Link
  7. congratulations to you both!
    time sure goes fast!:-)
    hugs!

    — Fer    31. March 2004, 05:29    Link
  8. Happy, happy blogday! And apologies for my belated greetings. Meeting you, Pica, was a highight of last year, and the Ecotone wiki has been an inspiration that has pushed my writing as well as introducing a whole crew of wonderful and supportive friends. I always look forward to reading Feathers of Hope because your posts really are precious, like feathers, and truly hopeful – reflecting the beauty of their creators! Thank you!

    — beth    2. April 2004, 11:33    Link

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