Mar 9, 2010 13
Nine.
In which this website would be in fifth grade now, if it were human.
GOBLINBOX.COM is nine years old today.
It’s been on at least seven different servers. It’s been hand-coded, it’s been run on Movabletype and WordPress. It’s had ten different forums. There have been as many as eight different databases at a time. There have been innumerable themes and color schemes and layouts.
It has suffered multiple crashes and some pretty significant data loss. There are sub-folders filled with broken image galleries. I’ve been asked to remove material a half a dozen times by both friends and employers. It’s been hacked twice, it’s been served take-down orders thrice, and it nearly got me sued once.
At its peak, it was getting ten thousand unique hits each month (now it gets about 2k), was spidered, indexed, and botted within an inch of its life, and it used upwards of 90% of the server’s total bandwidth.
It has been the cause of my learning FrontPage, HTML, Dreamweaver, graphic design and slicing, CSS, DNS, PHP, server security, MySQL, legal crap, and a lot of social crap.
I’ve written here about tech, work, sci-fi, gadgets, books, media, death, sex, miscarriage, love, divorce, travel, loss, weather, panic and anxiety, surgery, spirituality, film photography, knitting, and music – and there are even some pretty good recipes.
I’ve learned that some people will bitch at me for writing about them, and that other people will bitch at me for not writing about them. I’ve learned that there’s an awful lot of stuff I can’t write about, but that I can still somehow manage to convey what I need to convey.
Friends and family keep up with me through this website. I’ve made lots of new friends through this website. Some of them are old friends now, some of them dropped off the Internet, some of them I now know in real life.
Many of the blogs I’ve followed over the years are gone now. People are always announcing sabbaticals, or deleting their sites, or drifting away quietly. I’ve never announced a break, and never even felt the desire to do so. I love this website, and I really mean it when I say Here’s to another nine years!
When I’ve needed it most, I’ve received tremendous love and support here, and I truly cherish that. Thank you, all who come to visit, each and every one of you, old or new. I mean it. Even if you don’t comment.
If you want, you can take a trip with me down memory lane and look at the Internet archive entries. Remember when the site was orange? When it was purple? Those crazy Xmas themes I used to build? Hah!
GOBLINBOX.COM is nine years old today. Nine! Nine.










