Today is this blog’s 14th Anniversary.<\/p>\n
On February 5, 2002, I – a fairly recently divorced guy with a couple of kids and a fifteen-year-dead “career” as a pundit, working at a dotcom that was already circling the drain – read an article in\u00a0Time\u00a0<\/em>magazine about “the new generation of conservative intellectuals”. \u00a0They directed me to, of all people, Andrew Sullivan – who was a conservative, at the time – and in a sidebar, explained what a “blog” was.<\/p>\n Starving for an outlet, I ran out to “Blogger.com”, signed up, and started writing. \u00a0 And I’ve kept at it, most weekdays, ever since.<\/p>\n I got lucky – I got a couple of back<\/a> to back<\/a>\u00a0Instalanches bright and early\u00a0and, on one notable day back in 2004, simultaneous plugs from Instapundit, Hugh Hewitt and James Lileks – which pretty much put me on the map.<\/p>\n Blogs surged, of course, and then settled back into the social media pack behind Twitter and Facebook. \u00a0What was once a huge, bustling blogging scene in the Twin Cities is now a couple of blog superstars – Ed Morrissey, Lileks and the Powerline guys – and a small, hard core of people who just love to write; I’m one of them.<\/p>\n Up until that first couple of Instalanches, this blog got maybe 10 hits a day. \u00a0I’ve been holding steady around 1,000 visits every weekday for most of the past decade or so – not enough to make it a fulltime job, too many to be anything but thankful for the opportunity I’ve been given.<\/p>\n And it’s been an amazing opportunity. \u00a0It led, of course, to meeting a group of amazing friends; Brian, Chad and Atomizer from the Fraters<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(Brian emailed me back in 2002, the first person to tell me that there\u00a0were\u00a0<\/em>other bloggers in the Twin Cities), John and Scott from Power Line<\/a><\/em>, Lileks<\/a>, King Banaian (blog is long gone), Brad<\/a>, the Stroms and the Stewarts<\/a>, the tireless\u00a0Mr. D<\/a>, Enge, Gary<\/a>, Ryan, Foot, and too many others to mention.<\/p>\n And it led to the show, of which much more next month.<\/p>\n Anyway – thank you all for indulging my little outburst this past almost-decade-and-a-half.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today is this blog’s 14th Anniversary. On February 5, 2002, I – a fairly recently divorced guy with a couple of kids and a fifteen-year-dead “career” as a pundit, working at a dotcom that was already circling the drain – read an article in\u00a0Time\u00a0magazine about “the new generation of conservative intellectuals”. \u00a0They directed me to, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57418"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57419,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57418\/revisions\/57419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}