Confessions of a Hockey Fanatic 10 Year Anniversary

Well, I've made it here one more year. It's been a long ride towards this very anniversary. This blog has been the roadway for many opportunities as well as meeting new people across the blogisphere. When I first started Confessions of a Hockey Fanatic, I didn't know that I would be becoming a blogging pioneer as my initial foray into blogging. I thought that I would just use it as a hobby, but this year, I am celebrating it's 10 year publication history.

The story of my blogging career was this. I was IM chatting with a dear female friend from Tyler, TX who told me about a website that publishes diary journal entries. She wanted me to join her and hope that I could become involved with the already blogging community. Blogspot.com, before it was sold to Google, was indeed user friendly with several different ways to edit the blog page format. For it's content, I would just enter into the form square my thoughts and publish them. But instead of writing journal entries about my personal life, I chose to practice my journalism skills on the game that I love so dearly - hockey. My first blog entry was published today and discussed the playoffs as the Carolina Hurricanes had won the Eastern Conference Championship and followed up with some comments about how Patrick Roy had made a critical error allowing the Detroit Red Wings to tie up the Western Conference series.

COHF circa 2002

The Wayback Machine has helped out on this Internet nostalgia trip. The first blogspot publication was almost prehistoric with very little to look at. It was all text on a blue background. It had my PSU page link up there and a brief form listing my bio stats substituting as a real writers biography. Even though I knew basic HTML, it was still pretty frustrating to edit the page. There were some frustrating moments as the blog didn't look the way I wanted it to look. But as the years went on, I incorporated many programming language tricks I learned along the way.
 I did my best to put as many interests and shout-outs as I could to the many people that I encountered in my early days of using the internet. I wrote about what I knew at the time and featured my blog journal entries on the games I saw on TV.

As many more bloggers were starting up with their own publications, I saw myself in competition with them. So, to counter their attention, I became once again an innovator to the blogisphere. I was the first to incorporate a YouTube video directly into the blog article in 2006 and again including podcasting embedded within the blog source.

The pinnacle of the current blog technology is to incorporate live streaming video and audio content on the page. I'm going to be celebrating live on BlogTV.com website to mark the anniversary of 10 years and 100 episodes on the blogging channel. You can stay here and watch me broadcast live or come in to the chat room and ask me questions pertaining to anything hockey.



10th Anniversary + 100 Ep- Broadcast your self LIVE

Of course, I've got plenty of new things in store as well as continuing on the legacy of this blog. It's been a great 10 years - now let's make it ten more!

[Via: Internet Archive - Wayback machine]