The First Ever Post on BobinOz

Regular readers will notice that today the blog looks a little different. For those who are not regulars, this is what it looked like before. This was the blog…

And this was the website…..

When I first launched on January 1, 2009, I had no idea where it would end up. I probably still don’t.

Here’s a little story behind that launch.

I wanted my first post, one that I’d prepared earlier as they say, to go live just after midnight on January 1. But I knew I would be somewhere else plying myself with alcohol and wishing everyone a happy New Year. So I set my first post to go live at 12:01 AM that morning.

When I got back home from our New Year’s Eve celebrations, I was very excited, not that you would have been able to tell from my bleary eyes. I fired up my browser to see my first blog post online.

Nothing!

Anyone who has used WordPress will know there is a scheduler, where you can set the exact day and time, by the minute, when your pre-written post can go live. To make it work, you only need to do three things.

• Edit the time.
• Click schedule.
• Click publish.

Well, I got two out of three.

So about two o’clock in the morning I set about “fixing” this error and it was around that time that my first post went live with this video, which received rave reviews on YouTube……

• “The music is annoying!”
• “Songs terrible. But Australia is beautiful.”
• “The music doesn’t really fit the video does it?”

Oh well, you can’t please everybody. But if these people had watched closely, they will have noticed the music was performed live by a couple of (then) 13 or 14-year-old kids in a makeshift recording studio (my mate’s loft) back in England. You can see them right at the end of the video.

You can read my first post here.

Incredibly, at 3:36 AM (my time) I got a comment on that post from dawnanpete. I was blown away by this. I’d told nobody about my blog, none of my friends or family in England or here in Australia. Only my wife knew about the launch, but even she didn’t read it.

So my thanks to dawnanpete, whoever you are, I am grateful for the huge boost you gave me. I think it was some time before I got my second comment, but today I get lots and lots of comments and I appreciate them all.

I had 197 page views in the first month, these days I’ve just begun to break 50,000.

So I thought you, my valued readers, and I, deserved a new design.

But it’s not just about looking a lot prettier. If you look around you can now find a whole lot of fantastic new information. In the last few weeks I’ve created an additional 30 pages or so and redesigned a further 70. So please, take a good look around, there is something for everybody.

I’m not the fastest in the world, it’s taken 2 1/2 years to get here. But I’ve loved every minute of it.

Here’s to the next two and half years!