Now that my first full season of blogging is history I wanted to take a step back and look at the last year and a half. Behold, the state of the blog address (I’m not very creative when it comes to headlines).
15 months ago I grew to be frustrated at the lack of a quality Michigan basketball blog. I was a big fan of the Big Ten Wonk but Gasaway had gone on to greener pastures beyond just the Big Ten. I had also become an avid reader of the Detroit Tigers Weblog and could barely make it through a Tigers game without constantly refreshing the comments page. Somehow I wanted to attempt to bring the quality analysis of the Big Ten Wonk and mix it with the community of the Detroit Tigers Weblog.
I have been making webpages for ages so the first step was easy. I jumped in head first and started blogging. The writing still has a ways to go but I feel like my biggest success has been in creating a community. I have been simply dumbfounded at how many people read and comment on my posts. Since I started the blog there have been 1,123,114 page views and 9,865 comments on 559 published posts. I make a point to try to read every comment that comes through (they get forwarded to my e-mail) and I enjoy every one of them.
My main reason for writing this post is to thank each and every one of you that have ever posted a comment, sent an encouraging e-mail, donated money, or visited the site at all over the last fifteen months.
My second reason was to talk about what comes next and make sure this isn’t your last visit between now and November. The site actually grew over the course of last summer so I’m confident you all will stick around.
For the next week or so I’m going to take a bit of a break — there will probably be mostly links posts while I recover from the grueling stretch of blogging over the last couple weeks. Starting next week I’ll be doing a “report card” review of the entire roster, something that I started last year but never finished. It’s safe to say I have a little bit more positive momentum to carry me through that process this year.
I’ll also be focusing on recruiting all summer. First I’ll recap how Michigan targets finished their high school seasons and where their recruitments seem to be right now. After that it is on to AAU season when recruiting really picks up and we can only hope that this summer is as entertaining as the last.
I started a notes page for next year’s schedule, this was a popular page last year and basically it is just a running list of any scheduling information that has leaked out. So far it is a bit bare but you have to start somewhere I suppose. I’ll also be here to cover any other breaking news surrounding the basketball team and I’m sure we can find a couple other topics to debate this summer.
I also moved the site to a new server, there shouldn’t be any problems but DNS updates can be a bit finicky. The new server is faster and should also be more reliable which should help alleviate some of the issues over the last couple months.
Thanks for sticking with me for the first fifteen months, hopefully the next year is even better.
