Yesterday, we published our 1,000th article. The week leading up to that event was especially hectic. In addition to fifty hour weeks now being the new norm at my day job, I volunteer my time on the Twospoke.com cycling forums. Add to that all the other things life throws at us, and I rarely take a break from the moment I get up at 4:44AM (one minute before the alarm goes off, so it doesn’t wake my wife) until my head hits the pillow some time around 10:00PM. But last Monday, I sat down at the computer, only to find an error message on the screen. Without even reading it in full, I did hard reset, figuring Windows would sort itself out. And nothing. My server, with the site backups, thousand of personal photos, and all my other important documents, was dead. Luckily, it was just the motherboard, and I was able to pick up a used machine to throw my drives into. I have backups of the most important stuff, but the machine they’re stored on is old, slow, and doesn’t support dual monitors. It’s not conducive to writing at a very productive pace. Overall, it was rather traumatic from a writer’s viewpoint.
So now that I’ve lost a whole week, I’m sitting here writing this on my left monitor, with my calendar open on the right one. While we (I’m so very grateful for our contributors) have come pretty far since it was just me writing random stuff about cycling, all I see is that I’m way behind on reporting what we saw at Outdoor Retailer, and reviews are backing up. But then I peek at our stats for traffic, and realize that none of that really matters. People visit the site each day, they hang out and read a few pages, and come back again for more. About half found the site via search engines, but after reading what they came for, go on to check out another page or two. And that pretty much validates the effort we put into it each week.
There you have it. I’m too tired to write, so all I can come up with is a thank you for all the readers that share out interests. We’ll be back to our regular format tomorrow.
– Brian