I’m a day late in mentioning it, but yesterday, December 2nd, some 7 years ago I launched SEB under a different and entirely stupid name with the following really lame entry:

Homepage is now live

Well, it took awhile before I found a layout I was happy with, but I now have a home page up and running and some of the links even work. Seems like the part I have the hardest time with when making pages is the layout and coming up with some graphics that won’t cause visitor’s eyes to bleed the instant it comes into view. I’m still not certain what sections I plan to put into place, but the page as a whole will reflect my interests and opinions.

Certainly not a harbinger of the monstrosity that SEB would become both in terms of megabytes of text devoted to mostly trivial topics and amount of traffic it gets for being about nothing in particular. It would be a couple of weeks before I would write anything else because I was so clueless as to what the hell I was doing. The oldest archived version of SEB I could find on the Internet Archive is this page from May 29, 2002 which was prior to our purchase of the SEB domain name. The graphics are long gone, but it gives you an idea how how I quickly settled into the routine of blogging after the initial hesitant first steps. Alas a lot of SEB over the years is missing from the archive because they don’t archive dynamic websites which SEB became with the move to ExpressionEngine.

Now, some seven years later, we’re up to 6,104 entries (counting this one) and 72,877 comments. The average number of daily unique visitors is between 1,200 and 2,000 people and the amount of bandwidth consumed is way more than it probably should be. In the past seven years I’ve been laid off twice, moved from Canton to Brighton and then to Ann Arbor. I have had six different jobs and one honeymoon (we didn’t take ours until a year after we were married) to exciting Frakenmuth Michigan. My daughter grew up from the age of 11 to her current age of 18. I’ve been on Canada’s news show The National and been interviewed on being an out-of-work automotive employee. Best of all I’ve had the chance to interact with some of the most amazing people I have ever met both in comments here on SEB and via email/phone/in-person. 

There’s been some rough times as well, including a period where I nearly packed it all in and shut down the blog back in 2006 thanks to some frustrating hosting issues. I have no idea if SEB will continue for another 7 years or just another 7 months, but I don’t show any signs of stopping anytime soon. As long as you folks keep coming around to see what idiot thing I’ve said recently then I’ll probably keep saying them.

It amazing how time flies by though. Had you told me seven years ago I’d still be at, or that anyone would be paying attention, I’d have laughed out loud.