Last Updated on February 5, 2024
This week, I’m celebrating the 15th anniversary of ‘Patrick’s Place.’ It’s hard to believe that I’ve been at this for a decade-and-a-half now!
February 7, 2004, was a fairly ordinary day on which I decided to start something new. That certain something is what’s now celebrating a 15th anniversary: This little blog.
I try to think about what was on my mind when I decided to start a blog. I viewed it as a way to have a creative outlet. And I hoped it’d be a place where someone might come to be entertained. I dared not think, however, that anyone would actually come here and read what I have to say.
And I would never have dreamed that over 15 years, several hundreds of thousands of people would have dropped by…and that some of them would keep coming back for more year after year.
Realistically, I think that I set out to experiment with this crazy thing called blogging, something that was still fairly young back in 2004.
I wanted to see if I’d like it.
I assumed I probably wouldn’t…at least not for very long.
But by a twist of fate, I happened to find an audience.
You see, this blog didn’t begin on WordPress. It began on a small platform that hasn’t been around for nearly a dozen years or so: AOL Journals.
Yes, AOL. America Online. It had its own blogging platform. It was a tight-knit group of bloggers (most of whom hated the word blog at the time). We read each others’ posts. We commented on each others’ journals.
To make a long story very short, I eventually left AOL for Blogger, and then, in 2007, launched this domain with self-hosted WordPress. By then, I already had some semi-regular readers.
In a way, I was lucky: If I hadn’t found an audience in a smaller pond as quickly as I had, I may well have abandoned the entire idea before the 1st anniversary.
I certainly would never have reached a 15th anniversary for this blog.
So whether you’ve been reading for 15 years now or just about 15 minutes, and even if you’ve never left a single comment, your presence here is still inspiring me to keep writing.
I’m grateful.
And I hope you’ll enjoy the next 15 years! Who knows what we’ll be talking about by then!
