Splinters: Blog Post Number 2000

Written by:Chris Mitchell.

This is the 2000th post on the Splinters blog. Time for an orgy of self-congratulation. The first post was on September 9th 2000, six years - six years! - ago; Steve did most of the posting during 2003 and 2004 while I was off travelling; Nick popped up for a bit before he got too busy being a dad; now we’ve got Ben and Ismo blogging with us too since the middle of last year. I don’t think Splinters has a coherent voice like other litblogs, and I like that - it’s not simply because there’s four of us posting, it’s that we post on fairly disparate topics (but always with the same obsessions running underneath) which makes for disjointed reading. It does make it a bit more difficult to actually decide whether or not you like Splinters though, unless of course, you like your blogs a bit mixed up.

We’re still on Blogger, have been since the beginning, mainly because I’m too scared to try and move it somewhere else. I was going to hunt around in the archive to dig up some of the greatest hits, but frankly, I’m too scared to do that either. I might never come back out. It’s a shame that there isn’t a better way to organise such a huge collection of posts, to group them by topic etc so as to make it easier to peek in there - at the moment it’s like some yawning chasm of enthusiasm and invective just waiting for the next victim.

It’s funny how Splinters has grown from a place to stick snippets of stuff to be as popular as the main spikemagazine.com site, a second doorway into all the great articles there - and having the different voices on here, pitching in when they want rather than feeling obligated to post. There are apparently 230 people subscribed to the Splinters feed according to Feedburner, 66 on Bloglines although the feed there seems to have not been updated for weeks, and a handful of people getting it by email - most people seem to return to the webpage itself. Splinters is part of BritLitBlogs, which drives a steady trickle of traffic this way, and the MetaxuCafe network of literary blogs, but I have no idea how many people read it there.

So then - who’ll making the 2006th post?

More on 2000 blog posts:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia
Open Directory | Technorati: 2000 blog posts

Posted on January 11th, 2006.

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