Wow! Believe it or not Thought Box is already at its one year birthday!

Sure, one years old and this blog is still in its infancy. But for me, it’s been a long trip down the road.

So let’s go back and take a look down TB Memory Lane:I started the blog because my Twitter stream was getting way too overcrowded. I needed a new medium to share my thoughts.

After looking around for a few days, I decided that WordPress would be my platform.

First post ever

“A fierce competition is over”

After 2 weeks of relentless and at times savage competition, the Twitter competition between me and my friend, @onekopaka, has ended.

Onekopaka first proposed this competition as we both had the same number of tweets (somewhere around 890). I accepted the battle and there it went.

In the early days of the competition, nothing much happened. We tweeted as usual, and I eventually gained a lead of about 17 tweets. Then Onekopaka started finding more things to tweet about including this strange UnAd-for-Chrome thing and overnight, he grabbed the lead by 20 tweets.

Earliest posts

• Trying out a Firefox addon May 30
• Using ScirbeFire May 30
• Scribbles: A great bitmap editor for Mac June 1
• Fun Day June 3
• List of swear words in base64 language June 5

These were the early days, where every post was just text text and more text. No images whatsoever. In the months of May – June, my blog only received 194 total views.

But, things were about to change.

It was summer, and I was bored. I blogged about whatever things were on my mind at the time. Also important to note: the blog’s name back then was just “Deathgleaner’s Blog.” There were a lot of reviews posted, a post about Michael Jackson and a possible conspiracy surrounding his death, and just a few random long status updates and tips. I was writing more about my life back then when I had more time on my hands.

Several pages of my blog still contain these posts. If you’re curious, just type in the address bar “http://deathgleaner.wordpress.com/page/X”, replacing X with a desired page number. At last count, the upper limit is 14.

Controversy strikes

The big moment for my blog came in August of 2009. Increasing tensions between me and Wikipedia administrators led me to write a long complaint about the Nazi state of Wikipedia.

Why I really hate Wikipedia administrators

Wikipedia administrators have turned Wikipedia into an online totalitarian regime, and no one is doing a darn thing about it.

(Note: This does not apply to all administrators on Wikipedia.)

On a Wiki such as Wikipedia, there are 3 tiers of users: Regular users, Bureaucrats, and Administrators. Out of those 3 tiers, it’s the administrators that are the worst. If you are a regular user on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons or any Wikimedia Project (Wikimedia Commons, Wikisoure, Wikibooks, etc), you’ll know what I’m talking about.

This was by far the most viewed post on my blog. To this day, it still is.

The reason this post got so much attention is because a devout Wikipedia admin found the post on a Twitter search. Finding it interesting, he/she posted it on the French Wikipedia page “Le bistro“. The bistro page was very popular among admins, so many people steered towards my blog. On that page, one can still find a long stream of “hate” comments.

Statistics

The following statistics are for August 26 2009

• Blog pageviews total – 115
• Blog post views total – 78

Views went up even more the next day:

August 27 2009

• Pageviews – 117
• Post views – 102

My blog encountered a stream of negative comments, all from admins, overnight. Very controversial.

A few months later, some people who were sympathetic to my position commented on why Wikipedia admins suck.

To this day, this post continues to be popular, and in fact if you search “Wikipedia admins suck” on Google, my blog is the first that comes up.

Controversy, part 2

Due to so many comments about my post, and further struggles I had with the Nazi admins, I wrote another post, appropriately titled “Why I really hate Wikipedia administrators, Part II.” In this I rebutted the comments that admins wrote on my post, and Wikipedia admin haters immediately commented on this one.

A few days later, I found another post by another person who hated Wikipedia. It seemed to be a satire, so I decided to reblog it here.

Slowing down

Life began to get boring and busy so I stopped blogging for a little bit. I came back to WordPress, but didn’t blog as much. I wrote a lot more about technology, especially Apple vs. Windows things.

My blog’s theme changed many times throughout the first year because I couldn’t decide which theme was best. In fact, I’ve gone through at least 10 themes during this year.

Current state of TB

In one year, I feel like I’ve done everything to promote and develop a free WordPress-hosted blog. My base number of page views is 20 per day, which I feel is a satisfactory number for the time being.

My blog recently passed 6000 page views. Accomplished milestone!

Statistics

Number of page views since inception	6006
Posts	132
Pages	5
Comments	209
Categories	20
Tags	518
Subscriptions to this blog	1
Spam 🙁	804
Most active month	September: 942 page views
Least active month [not May]	June: 162 page views; followed by November: 278 page views

Most popular posts of all time:

1. Another example of phony weight loss programs 810 views
2. Musescore: A free notation program that’s actually good 552
3. Why I really hate Wikipedia administrators 484
4. Tutorial: How to land a plane in Google Earth Flight Simulator 189
5. Why I really hate Wikipedia administrators, Part II 183
6. Review: Stellarium 0.10 177
7. COEXIST 173
8. Why other people really hate Wikipedia administrators as well 142
9. Google Search gets wider 130
10. A visual guide to Opera 10 123

Most popular searches of all time:

1. apamin weight loss — 493
2. apamin for weight loss — 55
3. apamin smoothie — 39
4. coexist symbol — 38
5. constellation art — 24
6. list of swear words — 18
7. wii sports — 16
8. we detected that your feed doesn’t reflect… — 15
9. apamin smoothies — 15
10. constellations art — 14

Graphs

What’s in the future?

This blog has come a long way. Although it’s far below the “average joe” 2000 page views per day, I feel like this is a great blog because it’s so personal. I don’t care if it gets 2 or 2 million page views per day, it’s the content that matters.

In the future, I hope to get this blog self-hosted on its own domain. Of course, I still have to plan that out. I really want to do that for more customizability and uniqueness.

I will have to find new ways of promoting this website, through online ads, search listings, etc.

I’m also looking forward to adding a few authors to this blog so it isn’t so lonely. If you’re interested, contact me: mr.deathgleaner@gmail.com.

A big thanks to…

WordPress, for freely hosting this blog on an awesome blog platform, and…

My friend Onekopaka for inspiring me in the early days of my blog and providing great tech tips. You can visit his blog at http://theoks.net/blog .

As for this blog, let’s hope for another great year!