Blogiversary

I completely forgot that yesterday was my third anniversary of starting The Dignified Rant. I opened up the original blog on July 12, 2002, on Yahoo! Geocities, with a plethora of thematic areas although Foreign Affairs was the main point of the blog. I built it on an existing portfolio site that I made to highlight my publications. The "blog" originally had no permanlinks since I didn't anticipate I'd have much to say more than once a week at best. I'd have a current page and an archives page. Lileks was a major inspiration to start blogging since his site showed me that I didn't need to use classic blogging.

In February 2004 I rigged up some ersatz permanlinks when traffic started to pick up and Joe and Winds of Change chided me for no permalinks. Jeff at Caerdroia mentioned it, too.

By the fall of 2004, I could see that space was going to run out in a year. Clearly, I underestimated my ability to drone on about defense and security issues. Since I want space for other things on that blog, I decided to start up on Blogger with proper blogging limited to national security themes.

My old site is now The Dignified Rant: Home Edition. If you are reading this site, you may like List of Annoying Things linked at left. Otherwise it is old national security posts, stuff on my home life with pictures, and very occasional attempts at humor. I don't post there nearly as much as I want and do have projects in mind for that site that I haven't had time to get to yet.

I have not grown tired of the project though I've had lulls of motivation when I posted out of a sense of duty to do my part to bolster the home front and to raise issues about national security. My time in uniform was a while ago and I was not required to do anything tougher than sweat a bit. I am, however, under no delusions about my impact as a blogger. Several thousand hits a month is hardly a lot; though I've been linked to by big sites. Reverend Sensing is the largest site to link to me and I remain grateful for the blogroll listing. Instapundit has brought the most hits with a number of links over the last two years. Again, many thanks for his traffic. Other smaller blogs have linked to me as well and I am somewhat humbled that I have been deemed link-worthy by even a few. I considered joining Roger Simon's blogging news project and looked at his material, but the thought of having some semi-obligation to write actually depressed my desire to post. I'll forfeit a chance at more traffic via this project to stay a stand-alone project. I'll succeed or fail on my own. That's the way I like it.

My only regret is that my writing for publication has suffered in the last two years as projects started pre-blog made it to print or petered out after getting rejected. I have but limited free time and my writing time has been soaked up with this project. I have several pieces that I could rework and send out with not that much effort but they languish. I did enter one contest early this year and still await the results, so I have not been totally unproductive at least.

I'm sorry for the lack of comments but I couldn't give them the attention they deserve. Comments impose a responsibility on the blogger to monitor and address comments and I don't have the time to fulfill that responsibility. One day I would like to add comments if I'm still doing this years from now.

Thank you for reading and sometimes writing. Nice comments and constructive criticisms have far outweighed hate mail and idiocy. I have been amazed that I have people reading literally in every time zone. Not many readers, as I noted, but perhaps ten percent are from addresses identified as from other nations.

One day I really mean to start spell-checking this stuff.

And I must start a blog roll. Soon.