No, seriously. Has it been a year? On February 28th, 2007, I made the first post in this blog. From no subscribers to a few (thanks to generous initial links from Jason Powell and Tony Dye) to consistently over 100 (along with thousands of web hits), it’s been quite a year! October of 2007, during and after the Fall 2007 Church IT Roundtable, was the first month I surpassed 100 subscribers. Jason Powell, of course, has recently surpassed 1,000; I seem to track pretty closely at 1/10th his readership, which is certainly nothing to sneeze at.

Besides giving me an outlet to polish my writing–a never-ending process–this blog marked the beginning of the end of isolation for this Church IT guy! Little did I know, until I stumbled upon Jason Powell’s blog in some way I don’t even recall now, that there was a growing group of Church IT-ers getting to know each other online, while remaining somewhat isolated by positions that are generally volunteer or, perhaps most often with the online group, one-man IT department positions that make peers hard to come by on a regular basis. There are certainly exceptions, the churches where Jason Powell, Jason Lee and Clif Guy work included along with others, where churches are large enough to have two, three, or more IT staff, and those churches also tend to lead the way in creating and contributing to the online community (well, Jason Lee’s new to the blogging scene but has certainly started off strong). Do those guys just have the spare time, now that they have staff to do their grunt work, to spend online? (I hope you see the wit behind that fallacy–there are numerous one-man IT shop bloggers and many of the aforementioned IT Directors have bloggers on their staff, among many other reasons my question does not have merit! Arguably, one-man IT shops need the online community more than those with an on-site team!)

But I digress, because my initial question was if this blog has existed for one year already. Because I’m not sure. I managed to, unintentionally, begin this blog one year and one day before a leap year Feb. 29th. So, which is it? The 28th is the anniversary of my first post, but the 29th is the last day of the twelfth month. But don’t worry, I promise I won’t duplicate this post tomorrow, if you promise not to read it! Ironically, outside of Church IT I actually had a blog before Jason Powell (the brief 2002 foray he mentions notwithstanding), who made his first post back on Feb. 19th, 2005 (congrats!), while I started my personal blog just under four months before that, back on November 9th, 2004 (at around 2 am…not far off the time of day this blog started). It was the same day, coincidentally, that Firefox 1.0 was released. My personal blog was going rather strong until May of 2005, when a multi-month quiet period followed my engagement, and I was otherwise occupied. It picked up a little bit after the wedding (not immediately, of course…), and then, right about the time our son was born and I set up a blog just for him…it went completely dead and has thus mostly stayed. This blog is definitely more focused than my personal blog (mostly), and is about stuff I’m passionate about and work with on a daily basis. It’s been a little slower of late, but I’m looking forward to a summer free of most schoolwork where even a long workday can end happily without school deadlines looming that evening or the next. I’m taking a web design class this semester, so while I’m not debuting a new blog theme yet, I may take on the creation (or customization) of something over the summer. That, or I’ll be so fed up with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) by then, it’ll have to wait a bit longer…

Anyway: To the next year of online ChIT! (Hmmm…does that mean all this stuff is ChIT Chat?) And thanks for reading.