Fifteen years of Tankboy on Blogger.

Regular readers should be familiar with these characters from over the years.

Huh, the month of May seems to be rife with digital anniversaries for me. On May 24, 2002, the very first post appeared on this little site. It was a repurposed email from my Tankboy mailing list* at the time, and I was just testing out the waters.

It’s funny to think that this site has been around that long, outlasting blogging booms and busts, and just sort of trucking along. I never stuck with a single format, mixing MP3 postings with band and DJ promotion, and. cultural reviews. Well, I guess it always has had a single format—it’s always been a journal. And I have to admit I don’t know what drove me to do something like this so publicly at the beginning, or stick with it as long as I have.

Now it’s just a part of me.

A brief trip through those early years is sometimes painful but mostly amusing. In 2003 I decided to start writing a post every weekday and don't think I've missed a day yet.** It’s sometimes uncomfortable to have a pretty complete record of the things I’ve gone through over the years. In some ways I am so different, and in others it is shocking how little I’ve changed. But that’s the same for everyone; I just happen to have a kind of public accounting of it.

Anyway, whether you’ve been with me from the first post or just started reading yesterday; thanks.


*The precursor to this blog was the original Tankboy email, which—I believe—started in 1996. It was a regular summary of thoughts, recommendations, and whatever caught my fancy that I sent out to a slowly expanding network of readers. It started with AOL chatroom buddies and people that had college email addresses, and grew from there. So, in a way, I’ve been regularly “blogging” since 1996. I wonder how many people that read my stuff nowadays weren’t even born then. Mind-blowing.

**I could be wrong. It's possible near the beginning I did skip a day but I'm not sure, and I'm not going back to count. Let's just all agree that the posting has been unusually regular for a really, really long time.