The big one oh!

10 years.

Ten years of blogging.

Generally, April 15 is my least favorite day of the year (tax day in the U.S.). But, this year, I’m celebrating 10 years of running a Web site.

Ten years ago today, I stepped down a path that has changed my life in more ways than I can count. The site started out as a page on now-defunct Expage.com. I’d made a simple page with shoutouts to all my old high school friends. Little did I know that I’d eventually be earning my income from something that started out with so little substance. This blog has been with me since I was a confused teenager and continues to be an outlet for me as a somewhat less-confused adult.

I won’t bore you with all the details. You can check out the archives if you want to see my journey. You can even start with my first blog post.

I want to thank everyone who has taken this journey with me. In particular, I want to thank everyone involved in the WordPress community for giving me a platform that has allowed me to easily publish my content online for the better part of these past 10 years (it sure beats the heck out of those text files I started with).

I’m looking forward to the next 10. I hope they’re as exciting as the previous years and that you will continue reading and commenting.

I’ll leave you with some of the most popular items from my blog over the years.

Top 10 commented posts

Here’s a rundown of the most popular posts on my blog by comment count. Note that some of the themes are pretty high up there because I didn’t have a support forum back in the day.

  1. Structure: WordPress Theme (1,005 comments)
  2. Visionary: WordPress Theme (518 comments)
  3. Custom post types in WordPress (509 comments)
  4. Options: WordPress Theme (506 comments)
  5. Get the Image: WordPress Plugin (438 comments)
  6. Custom taxonomies in WordPress 2.8 (341 comments)
  7. Members: WordPress Plugin (341 comments)
  8. Cleaner Gallery: WordPress Plugin (334 comments)
  9. Goodbye, headaches. Hello, menus! (334 comments)
  10. Adding and using custom user profile fields (249 comments)

Top 10 Google Analytics posts

I’ve only been using Google Analytics since late 2007 and routinely removed the tracking code from my site every time I changed themes (yes, tracking codes belong in plugins), so these numbers aren’t entirely accurate. However, they will give you a good view of my most visited posts on this site thus far.

  1. Cleaner Gallery: WordPress Plugin (309,852 views)
  2. Custom post types in WordPress (271,448 views)
  3. Options: WordPress Theme (231,947 views)
  4. Structure: WordPress Theme (220,629 views)
  5. Get the Image: WordPress Plugin (178,947 views)
  6. How to creae tabs using jQuery (163,296 views)
  7. Visionary: WordPress Theme (162,257 views)
  8. Goodbye, headaches. Hello, menus! (158,441 views)
  9. Members: WordPress Plugin (118,848 views)
  10. Showing custom post types on your home page (106,604 views)