Celebrating Our Successes (more boring administrative notes)

July is a special month for me. This blog celebrates its 2-year anniversary.

It’s safe to say that when I started I had no idea of what I was doing, and 2 years later I’m not all that much closer to understanding it. Every now and then some neophyte emails me and asks me for some blogging advice. The best tip I can give them is ‘Don’t use Hotmail. It will break your heart.”

2 years ago there were 2 CBC blogs, Dan Misener likes the radio and Tod Maffin’s I Love Radio. Both were run by freelancers, both were not exclusively about the CBC, both were very radio-centric, and both have moved on. There was also CBCWatch and the very bold, very French, incredibly short-lived, and for me, very influential and inspirational radcanblog.

Both are also gone.

These days there’s a lot more choice, but at the time they were pretty thin on the ground. Of course, the 2005 lockout changed all that.

Recently I experimented with expanding the scope of Tea Makers to include some Toronto-centric non-CBC things like Allan’s photo essays and more talk on non-CBC media but after some consideration I’ve come to realize that people don’t come here to see dildos for sale on Yonge Street, they come to read about the CBC and hopefully to add their take in the comments.

So I’m going to bring it back to basics, and that’s what you can expect here for year 3.

I also asked Guylaine Saucier to come up with a “2 Year Anniversary” design which is pretty much the old design save for an extra sidebar. I’m emboldened by CBC.ca’s wider page and you can find some cool stuff in there like the latest comments, interesting links that I find in my travels and might not have time to write about, my Commenting Policy which was implied but never stated, and some other CBC bloggers (if I missed you, email me and I’ll link you up there).

So what was the last year like on this site and at the CBC? If you’re interested, here’s The Tea Makers’ Greatest Hits, the most popular pages on this site from July 2006 to July 2007, as reported to me by Google Analytics.

  1. Joe Finds Me Patronizing
    Joe Clark linked to me from his site when I offered a free wallpaper designed by Dwight Williams in support of his Micropatronage drive. People came from the 4 corners of the earth. I suppose it’s a cliché to say he’s “big in Japan,” but judging from the emails I got Joe Clark is revered as some kind of God in Europe.
  2. Farewell To Sue
    My guess is that people who work at CBC.ca eat gravel for breakfast. Or maybe they are on the computer a lot. Or maybe there are some problems at work. But whenever I post about CBC.ca these guys go nuts.
  3. Vampire Freaks
    In the aftermath of Kimveer Gill I wrote about the CBC’s coverage of goths. For some reason this post has a high ranking on Google and ever since goths have been coming regularly and commenting on it. I can’t tell if they’re angry at me, the CBC, or other commenters, but I hope that what I’ve heard is true, that they mean us no harm, becuase they’re pissed off at somebody.
  4. An Itchy Ring Finger
    Stursberg and MacNeil, recently pumped up by rumours of, well, read the comments yourself.
  5. Claude Bleeds CBC.ca of Nerds
    More on CBC.ca.
  6. Gill Deacon part 2: Snow White as eco-warrior
    Your guess is as good as mine on this one. Far from Allan’s best work, this is one of the most popular pages on the site. Maybe there’s not much about Gill Deacon on the internet.
  7. Hiatus
    This post was on the home page for months, proving that I’m most popular when I don’t write anything at all.
  8. To Hell With John Doyle
    This one is a personal favourite of mine, but I suspect its hits were cranked up by John Doyle refreshing the page himself.

And so on.

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