My how time flies when you’re having fun. I completely forgot that my 3 year blogiversary was at the start of this month. December 2, 2001 is a day that will live in infamy. The day that I started my blog with a simple announcement that briefly outlined my goals for the site. That was the only entry I posted for the entire month and my second entry in January reveals that I hadn’t a clue what I was going to talk about after all.  The first real entry that gave a hint of the mayhem that was to come is also still my all-time favorite. I posted it on Monday, January 28th, 2002 and it was called Crimes and Misdemeanors. It’s all about profanity laws and my tendency to violate them regularly.

I started off with by editing the page by hand and then quickly moved to using a simple Perl script known as Coranto (aka NewsPro) to handle the back end until finally discovering MovableType and settling on that for the next couple of years. The blog’s name has changed twice since then. I don’t recall what the first name was—probably something stupid like LES’S HOMEPAGE—but the second name it had was Wandering Randomly Amongst The Blogs which was, in retrospect, a very stupid name that at one time I thought was exceedingly clever. The third name is the now familiar Stupid Evil Bastard which I switched to on April 14, 2002. Spending a little time this morning looking over those early entries I’m struck by a couple of things: First is the almost complete lack of comments most of the entries back then got and second is how much my content has improved since then.

As I type these words the stats for SEB stand at:  2,706 entries with 21,397 comments, 639 trackbacks and 428 registered members. This past November we had 85,924 unique visitors that made 145,867 visits to SEB viewing some 768,305 pages resulting in 3,504,296 page hits consuming around 20.61GB of bandwidth in the process. That’s not counting the bots, worms, and other similar traffic.

Not bad for a random yahoo who shoots his mouth off too much. I must confess that seeing the numbers is pretty amazing to me. Someone recently referred to me as being an “A-List Blogger” and that came as a total surprise to me because I still view myself as just this guy with this website who writes about random topics he’s interested in as they happen to catch his attention. I’ve met a lot of great people over the past three years and have gotten to know some of them pretty well in the process. It’s odd to say it, but some of the best friends I’ve got are people I’ve never met. Not sure why, but three years feels like a big milestone to me. Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen so many other folks grow tired of this hobby and the challenges it brings and fold up shop while I continue to find it both enjoyable and worthwhile. Hard to say, but I’m looking forward to the next several years of causing trouble.