The end of the year/ beginning of the new year is always a time for looking back over the past year and reviewing. So, since I didn’t do any end-of-the-year type post, I’m doing this one instead. I originally posted a “history of my blog” timeline here. However, many important milestones have happened in the last year or so, since I originally posted it. So I am reproducing it below, and then adding the new things at the bottom.

[EDIT: I totally forgot about almost kind of being mentioned on the radio once, see 6/5/2008!]

2/17/2004 – My first post ever. Not very exciting.

8/3/2005 – This was my first post back after a one year blogging hiatus. This was significant, not only because I resumed blogging, but also because it marked a new era. Previous to this, my blog was more of a personal journal, after it became more of a “best of the Internet” aggregator and link place holder, which is more or less what it is today.

8/2/2007 – Announcing the birth of Evie. This post straddles the line of important event in my life vs. important in terms of the blog. However, I think it is safe to say that Evie has had a big impact on blog, both in terms of giving people a reason to check here, and for giving rise to the “Evie Update” category (138 items), and the “From the Mouths of Babes” category (86 items).

3/26/2008 – My first post on WordPress. I can’t say enough how much better WordPress is compared to LiveJournal. LiveJournal has some advantages, particularly in the facebook type community aspect, but in terms of pure blogging power, there is no contest. So switching over to WordPress had a big impact on how the blog evolved after that.

6/5/2008 – After a friend and I both blogged about eating a delicious cupcake named after a radio host, said cupcake was discussed on the program and the host mentioned that two bloggers had talked about him and his cupcake over the weekend. OMG, that was totally us!

6/21/2008 – Childhood hero of mine, Commander Mark Kistler, comments on my blog post about him.

6/23/2008 – A title mishap (in which I may have implied their product causes rickets) brings me to the attention of Bob’s Pickle Pops, ultimately leading to them sending me some free samples. This was the first and only time this blog led to any sort of compensation.

8/25/2008 – Someone from my favorite store ThinkGeek comments on a post. Of course it is the one and only time I am bashing one of their products (for something that was totally not their fault, mind you), but hey, I’ll take it.

1/3/2009 – First post of the 3rd incarnation of my blog, in which I started blogging every day. It wasn’t exactly formal, I was just sort of testing myself to see if I could do it, and then I just kept doing it. At first I planned to blog 7 days a week, but I eventually settled into a M-F pattern. Coming up with 5 topics a week is extremely difficult, and I was worried that the quality would drop off. I don’t think it really has, though I might not be the best judge.

1/21/2009 – My 500th post.

2/17/2009 – My 5 year blogiversary.

2/24/2009 – My 500th comment.

5/21/2009 – The first post after I started to push my posts out to Facebook (and then later, Twitter). This was significant because I think most people I know didn’t really know I had a blog. So this opened us up to a much wider audience.

10/5/2009 – My post about Chicago getting passed over for the Olympics gets picked for the front page of WordPress.com. It was a wild ride which resulted in 10,384 visitors to my site for the month, about 4 1/2 times more than my highest regular month.

4/12/2010 – Oliver’s birth announcement. As with Evie’s birth, I expect many future blog contributions due to this. Of course this spawned the “Ollie Update” category.

11/11/2010 – My 1,000th post. Interesting how it took me 5 years to get the first 500, and less than 2 years to get the next 500.

11/17/2010 – Moved the blog to shanehalbach.com, and also changed the look of the blog for the first time in 2 years (and the first time I changed the color scheme ever, since I started blogging).

11/29/2010 – I had a guest post on the food website Cheap, Healthy, Good. Although it didn’t bring that many hits to my own blog, it was still fun to put a post of mine in front of a lot of unfamiliar eyeballs. (According to this, at the time of my guest post, Cheap, Healthy, Good was getting about 15,000 hits a day…significantly more than what I got in my best MONTH, which itself was way higher than an average month)