Anniversary Time!

I have two recent anniversaries in my calendar, one last month and the other this month.

First, my original arts-and-writing website, DanielThomas.org, turned four years old in February. It's hard to believe that it's been four years since I first launched the site in 2003. It was the result of many weeks and months of hard work and planning. I originally wanted a website to host my artwork, as well as whatever I felt like writing about. I taught myself web design, thankfully discovering Dreamweaver and figuring out how to assemble all the pages together.

DanielThomas.org has always been a sprawling website. This goes against the rules of web design, which tell you to focus on one simple topic or theme in order to attract visitors. Sorry to say, I could never follow this rule. My life was just too sprawling; I had too many interests to keep bottled up.

I've redesigned and improved the site a number of times, and I think the last redesign was a year or two ago. I don't plan on changing anything else, and, strangely enough, I don't add much new content there anymore. Most everything that I need to access - the art galleries, the movie reviews, the game essays and strategy guides - is already there. So I think of it as a great library that has been very successful. I'll have to check the logs to see how many visitors I've had, but I broke the million-hit mark ages ago.

So happy birthday to DanielThomas.org.

Now to the second birthday. Conversations on Ghibli turns one year old on March 30! Yay!

I've been thinking about doing something to celebrate, like having a contest and giving away prizes. I'll let everyone know within a few days;

This blog is the main hangout for me now, and it's where I put the lion's share of my writing. The traffic isn't anywhere where I'd like it to be, but that's something I just need to work on. I'll need to work on the marketing angle more, making more connections to the animation communities. Oh, and I still want to do a weekly podcast. I'll tinker around with that tomorrow, when I'm not working on compiling the Heidi riffs.

Finally, I do plan to have my computer hooked back up to the internet by next weekend. Just need one more paycheck for rent and cable bill. And then I need to save for my move, hopefully in April. Unless, of course, I find some really cool records that I can't pass up. No way in bloody hell is "Elvis is Back!" getting out of my hands!

So, to recap - DanielThomas.org turned four in February, Conversations on Ghibli turns one on March 30. I'll be putting together some sort of contest with prizes. Cable modem will be back in another week. "Elvis is Back!" is the greatest rock 'n roll album of all time. Vinyl rocks. Ja, mata!