Ten years of the AmeriNZ Blog

Today is the tenth anniversary of the AmeriNZ Blog: I published my first post, “I live in a land downunder. No, the other one…” on September 13, 2006. After a decade of this, I could have lost interest, but apart from a few brief times, that hasn’t happened. And, even then, or after times in which I’ve been particularly busy with other things, I always eventually catch-up and carry on.

However, this is the first time I’ve mentioned this Blogoversary since 2013. Last year, it was overshadowed by the twentieth anniversary of my first arrival in New Zealand, and in 2014 I was busy with New Zealand’s election campaign. I accept those as valid reasons to miss talking about the anniversary.

This year I made a special effort to mark the anniversary, because ten years is a long time in Internet years. It’s the date that was the beginning of me engaging in what is now fashionably called “content creation”. A few months after this blog, I started the AmeriNZ Podcast (which will itself turn ten in a few months), the 2Political Podcast with my friend Jason, and my much neglected AmeriNZ YouTube Channel, among other things.

Over the years, I’ve struggled with questions of whether I should focus this blog more sharply, but I always came back to the fact that I’m a “magpie blogger”, as I talked about in that 2013 anniversary post, picking up on something Roger Green talked about. In the end, I realised that this is a personal blog, and my podcast and YouTube Channel are just other ways to tell stories, different aspects of the same thing.

For example, in 2013 I wrote about “The origins of AmeriNZ”, which explained where the name came from, and last year I created a video to explain it all visually (I’ve included that at the bottom of this post). Different ways to tell stories.

I explained the origins of this blog specifically back in 2010, but it was in 2008 that I changed the title header up top to the one I made. In 2012, I added a left sidebar with subject tags—after one of those times thinking about whether I should focus this blog more sharply—and that left me with a weird space at the right-hand side. I’d always planned on putting something there, then decided the blog was already too busy visually. But that space bugged me (sometimes…).

So, in celebration of the Tenth Anniversary of AmeriNZ Blog, I’ve updated the title header up top, and the welcome graphic in the upper right-hand corner (the true purpose of which is to be the default graphic for posts I share to Facebook and Google+ for those posts with no graphic or that have YouTube videos). It’s a small thing, but a thing nevertheless.

I have no idea if blogs will exist ten years from now, or whether I’ll still be doing one. Still, what I said at the end of my first post ten years ago today is still true: Pour yourself a cuppa, relax, and let’s see where this leads.

Thanks for joining me on the journey so far.

Previous posts on my blogoversaries:

Anniversay Time (2007)
Blogoversary 2 (2008)
Anniversaries Three and Fourteen (2009)
Fourth blogoversary (2010)
Fifth blogoversary (2011)
Sixth blogoversary (2012)
Seventh Blogoversary (2013)