January 2005 - January 2006

One year of ... well it's not one year of blogging since I started my French language blog a few months before and it's not one year of meeting people online either since I also started that a few months before but it is this blog's anniversary. Though if you look carefully at my archives you will notice that I've not been a regular blogger, whole months without even a four line post... Even when I promised myself to blog at least once a week I just could not manage...

But all is not negative, when I first started this blog I just wanted a place to write about my net meetings, about the people, the things they said to me and how I'm living these experiences, my thoughts and... you know the usual things people blog about. It was suppose to prevent me from annoying my friends and family (!) with the stories of those strange strangers. It did serve that last purpose and I'm happy about that.

Like many bloggers, I also wanted lots of traffic on my blog, and I did add it to quite a few directories, I even joined a website that promises to explode your blog traffic (yes they can). But visits that last less than 1 second were just not enough for me anymore I wanted traffic from the major search engine, I wanted to be crawled by the Google bots. I was so excited the first time someone visited my blog from Google and so disappointed when the Google bots stopped crawling the homepage while I was expecting a deep crawl -argh!!!-. But I was (still am) getting regular traffic from Yahoo, and a few visits once in a while from Msn. It wasn't enough I felt my blog was not worthy of being listed in Google's search results....-poor me-.

In the mean time I started having regular visitors, most of them bloggers, an unexpected and quite intimidating phenomenon. I started worrying about my blog's content, I even went back to update some of my old posts because I was afraid my readers would actually read them. Though I must say it has helped to know others were reading and receiving feedback from them has been valuable. Though my worries made me write less non-sense (I hope), they also made me think more of what it is I should write about in the first place, though I still enjoy writing about my people I try to write for a broader humm readership(?)

This post would not be complete if I did not mention a few people: my very first net-friends, Brunda, Ravi, Anay, Prasad, Sumit; my most prolific net friend Dhruv, Basam on whom I wrote a trend setting post (?); Dozy who kindly sent me pictures of his hairs (!!!), my first blogger pals/readers, Rizal Farok (the greenyphunk), Apostle John, Meq, Sudhamshu Hebbar, and more recently Nick Tay who's blog -and friends' blogs too- have inspired me.... well, maybe not too much for this blog, mostly for my other French language personal blog; but that's another story.

One more reason why I hate MSN Messenger

I use a Powerbook once in a while and it's owner had installed an MSN Messenger for Mac that I also use once in a while. The last time I tried to used it one of those things I hate the most about using MSN Messenger happened. It told me that there is a new version available -yeah like I cared?- and that I needed to download it if I want to continue using MSN Messenger -what??- I JUST HATE IT WHEN MSN MESSENGER DOES THAT!!!! Yeah but most of my university friends only use MSN so I don't really have a choice but it does bug me. I mean there are still people using Yahoo! messenger version 5 I'm still using the version 6 (windows version) and I've been ignoring all the Update available messages from Yahoo!. But I guess MSN has its reason for not allowing people with non updated versions of MSN Messenger to use it to chat with their friends, yeah I'm sure they do.