AgilityNerd is 5 Years Old
08 Aug 2009
Five years ago today, I started this blog to post courses I was creating for my classes at Lincolnwood Dog Training Club in Glenview Illinois.
At the time blogging was getting main stream acceptance outside of technical circles and was being done by more and more regular people. I figured it would be a more flexible way to present agility information than traditional websites, email lists and online forums.
The Expanding AgilityNerd
(I’m not talking about my waistline…) As I’ve learned more about designing and building websites I’ve tried to expand my website’s capabilities to help other agility enthusiasts:
- I created my own CleanRun magazine search engine
- I launched the AgilityNerd online store
- I created Googility.com for searching the web and locating agility in the physical world
- I created Box Drill Generator for automatically creating Box sequences
Some Stats
Being an Engineering type I had to check some statistics. In those five years I’ve written 430 articles containing 260,000 words and created over 700 images. When I started I didn’t imagine this would grow to this extent.
The First Agility Blog?
This anniversary got me wondering if AgilityNerd might be the oldest or oldest still existing agility-centric blog. I don’t have my emails from that time period but I seem to recall when I inquired about other agility blogs there weren’t any. There were plenty of people blogging about their lives, their dogs and even including their agility adventures. But I can’t recall any other agility blogs.
I know Solveig Trippestad had and still has a thorough agility website and has a blog with entries back in 2005 but I don’t know if she was blogging in 2004. I was going to send her an email to see, but today rolled around before I got around to doing it.
It doesn’t really matter that much to me, but it would be fun to have “bragging rights” to “oldest agility blog” or “first agility blog” :^)
What's Next?
There have been times this past year when I felt like taking a hiatus from blogging; I like doing it but it can be hard to find the time. I’ve also been writing longer posts and they take me a long time to write. But as long as readers feel they get some benefit from my writings I’ll keep at it.
I’ve been contemplating changing my blog to allow me to keep my longer stories on the home page while I add other shorter stories. I also think there were some more “philosophical” articles I wrote over the years that might be worth revisiting by newer readers. So I’m still thinking about what that might look like on my blog. Maybe agilitynerd.com would be the entry point with the featured article and the blog would be shown below a paragraph of the featured article. I’ll keep thinking about it.
I haven’t been much of a fan of Twitter but I’m playing around with it. I’m going to start sending tweets when new articles are posted and I’m thinking of posting interesting links that I don’t have time to write about in more detail to Twitter also. So now you can follow me @agilitynerd. I’ll do something similar with @googility.
Nancy has been working on some really creative graphics for hand silk screening onto high quality T shirts. So we hope to have those in the AgilityNerd store sometime soon.
I have two new web projects under development. For now I’ll just tease you with these brief descriptions. I’m most excited by an idea I had for combining some web technologies to revolutionize how we use video in dog training. The second is a site that would combine the best of agility blogs in a way to make agility training information even more accessible.
So whether you are a new or long time reader, thank you for reading and commenting on articles! That feedback is what makes the time I spend writing AgilityNerd worthwhile.
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