Happy first birthday to Microcosmologist! Since the very first post was on December 1st 2010, I guess we’ve been one for a while now.
It’s been an interesting project on many levels. It’s also amusing to look back on the sketching and drafting I did, originally brainstorming on what I wanted the website to be, before I had even put anything up. All in all, I feel what’s here now is a solid actualization of what I had envisioned a year back. Maybe some of the more ambitious ideas never became reality; I never created my own custom mp3 player for the navigation bar, I never figured out a way to get past ‘frames’ and still have that navigation bar, and I haven’t made it quite the dizzying maze of self-referential links I’d wanted–but overall, the majority of the bullet points were crossed off the list.
A lot of the ideas which never made it into reality were the ones that simply would’ve taken a lot of effort for not much real return. It would’ve been cool to have some fancy splash screen as an intro to the site… which any regular visitors would watch once and then bypass every time afterward. It would’ve been really neat to host my own photo gallery onsite, and animate it to look like a slide projector… but flickr makes it so easy to organize and share large images; not to mention the fact that it won’t crash when 40,000 people come to see your infographic all on the same day! I guess that underscores the need to wisely allocate your time. It doesn’t make sense to invest huge amounts of effort into something that won’t add all that much to the end user experience.
The biggest highlights of building this site have most definitely been who it’s put me in touch with. Talking to Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute was coolness that crossed over into surrealness. Mister Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy blog was a peach to chat with. I also traded emails with Simon Allen the drummer in my favorite band, The New Mastersounds, and got to chat it up with guitar wizard Eric Krasno on the phone for a half hour. All these were supreme pleasures. I wonder what 2012 will hold!?
Tags: general nerdery, musings, my soapbox
Happy Anniversary! I’d say you’ve had a pretty badass first year for this blog and that even more badassery will follow.
A-why thank you miss Styles! It has been an excellent year indeed! A lot to be thankful for.