Ten Years
drorzel | June 26, 2012The title pretty much says it all.
One of the reasons I wanted to get the Ten Years Before the Blog series done was that I'm incredibly burned out on everything right now, and I need to step away from the Internet for a while. There are too many things that aren't getting done, and I just can't keep putting in the time needed to produce blog content. I figured that re-reading the highlights of the last ten years would either re-invigorate me, or failing that, it would at least provide a good placeholder for when the blog goes dark.
I'm not officially quitting ScienceBlogs or anything like…
drorzel | June 26, 2012In which we reach the end of our decade-long historical recap.
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So, at long last, the recap of my decade of blogging has reached the current year. And I do have a file of pre-filtered links from the current year (well, up through early May, when it was put together), which I was going to go through and post in the same manner as previous years.
But you know how when some magazine does a list of the "top 40 songs of the last 40 years," or whatever, there are always 6-8 songs from the last couple of years, and you say "No way. It may be a big hit right now, but it's too soon to call…
drorzel | June 25, 2012In which we look back on the ninth full year of this blog, and one of the most unpleasant incidents in the whole run, which nearly ruined what was otherwise a good year.
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This is probably going to be the longest of these posts, at least in terms of the number of links included-- I've got all of the worthwhile-looking posts open in tabs, and it comes to 82 total. I may ditch a few of them during the post-writing process, but we'll see how that goes.
Anyway, this blog year kicked off with probably the least enjoyable incident of the entire run, namely Sodamageddon. The higher-ups at…
drorzel | June 22, 2012In which we review yet another good year of blogging, including the establishment of some ongoing series. And also a useful reality check.
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This great blog re-read project has been useful for a couple of reasons. First, it's reminded me that there have been long stretches of time when I produced a lot of good stuff for the blog. When I initially considered this, I was a little afraid that the whole thing would be depressing, and I wouldn't have anything good to point to. If anything, though, I've had the opposite problem-- cutting things down to a manageable length (assuming these…
drorzel | June 20, 2012In which the great blog recap rolls on to probably the most important event of the last ten years: the arrival of SteelyKid. And a bunch of other bloggy stuff.
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There's really no question what should be the featured image for this recap post: Clearly, it needs to be an early photo of SteelyKid, who arrived not quite four years ago, and soon made friends with Appa the stuffed sky-bison. Sadly, we haven't been very good about doing regular pictures of The Pip, mostly because it's so exhausting to keep up with the two of them.
Of course, regular blogging continued as well. This seems…
drorzel | June 19, 2012In which we look back at a very political, perhaps excessively political year on the blog.
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I'm picking up the pace of my recap because I'd like to get through as much as possible before the actual tenth anniversary of the blog this Friday. I won't get through every year, but I'm going to try to do as many as I can.
2007-2008 was a somewhat problematic year for me. On the one hand, there was some pretty good stuff in there, but there were also a number of ugly political squabbles. This was around the time I stopped even trying to read all of ScienceBlogs, and trimmed my RSS…
drorzel | June 18, 2012In which we look back at a particularly eventful year for the blog.
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The ScienceBlogs archives aren't really set up very well for reading straight through, so as we reach this part of our historical recap, I've changed methodology. Since I have better analytics for the ScienceBlogs years than the Steelypips ones, I've got a list of the most-read posts in the history of the blog on ScienceBlogs, which I'm using as a starting point for the recap. This is a highly imperfect method, I realize, and the recent "upgrade" of Google Analytics made it inordinately difficult to get this…
drorzel | June 13, 2012In which we look at the end of the Steelypips era and the launch of ScienceBlogs.
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Before the Great Upgrade derailed things completely for a month, I was working on a recap of this blog's history, and had gotten up through the end of 2005, which marked the end of my time as an independent blogger.
I was first approached about the idea of ScienceBlogs in late 2005 by Christopher Mims, then at Seed magazine, who later tweeted a secret history of ScienceBlogs. I was initially a little apprehensive about the idea, as I was still pre-tenure at that time, and hadn't attempted to explain…
drorzel | May 8, 2012Continuing the blog recap series, we come to the "split year" of 2005-2006. The blog was initially launched in late June, so that's when I'm starting the years for purposes of these recaps, but ScienceBlogs launched in January 2006, so this year was half Steelypips and half ScienceBlogs. This post will cover the Steelypips half, June-January; I'll do the ScienceBlogs stuff in a second post, once I figure out the best way to go through those posts (the ScienceBlogs archives aren't set up well for reading straight through).
In reading through this, I was amused to discover this pan of Seed's…
drorzel | May 1, 2012Delayed again by the need to do actual, you know, work, here's a look back at the third year of this blog's existence. You can also read posts covering year one and year two.
2004-2005 was the last complete year before the move to ScienceBlogs in January of 2006, after which the making of these posts will become more complicated, because my posting rate went way up. For this year, though, I was still sticking to one post a day, and the blog had settled into a pretty decent groove.
The year did feature a brief foray into silly physics-related fiction, which might possibly be called a precursor…
drorzel | April 24, 2012The schedule called for this to appear last Friday, but as I was just back from a funeral, yeah, not so much. I had already gone through and bookmarked a whole slew of old posts, though, so here's a recap of the 2003-2004 blogademic year (starting and ending in late June).
This year saw a few milestones, though not quite as many as the previous year. I got a grant, passed my third-year reappointment review (the first big hurdle on the way to tenure), and we had a visiting speaker from Yale one week who mentioned in passing an idea that became central to my research program.
Probably the most…
drorzel | April 13, 2012As threatened a little while ago, this is the first of ten hopefully weekly posts looking back at the ten years this blog has been in operation. This one covers the period from the very first post on June 22, 2002 to June 21, 2003.
When I started doing this look back, I was more than a little afraid that it would prove cringe-inducing. It's been ten years, after all, and in that time I've gone from a wet-behind-the-ears, recently married assistant professor to a tenured father of two and a published author. That's enough external change that I was expecting my early posts to seem, well,…