Being Amber Rhea

The birthday of the Beast

Originally uploaded by cesarastudillo

Today my blog turns six. (It’s also the one-year anniversary of me moving to WordPress. Oh, and I’m celebrating by being at work and being sick.) Hard to believe all that’s happened in that timespan! I’ve graduated from college, started and graduated from grad school, gotten the biggest shock of my life, moved to Texas, gotten divorced, moved to Atlanta, worked at… let’s see… at least five different jobs, met some great new friends, reconnected with some old friends, and most importantly, met the GDBF (and our three-year anniversary is coming up in a few weeks!).

What will be the next chapter in my life with a blog?

Happy Birthday Being Amber Rhea

Originally uploaded by Amber Rhea.

As you can see, last night’s blog birthday party was a rollicking good time. Special thanks to Sara for making these awesome, blog-specific cupcakes (with really tasty icing, I might add). I can’t remember if I ate 3 or 4 of them; I lost count.

Amid the revelry last night, two podcasts were recorded. One consisted of Sherry and I kind of interviewing each other about blogging, social media, and all that good stuff. The other involved passing the recorder around to everyone at the table, and having each person talk about their blog, why they started it, blogging in general, and whatever else they wanted to say with a digital recorder in their face. Look for both of those soon on Mostly ITP.

Thanks to everyone who came out last night for the festivities! What more could a blogger ask for?

Update: It just makes sense to include a roll call of everyone who came last night, since almost everyone there was a blogger.

Blogs in attendance:

• Alenda Lux
• Blog for Democracy
• The Daily Bacon
• Drama Wench
• Drifting Through the Grift
• An Entrepreneur’s Journey
• Going Through the Motions
• GrabbingSand
• Gratuitous Dumbassitude
• Monotonous
• Peachtree Screed
• Radical Georgia Moderate
• Sodomy Creek
• Spacey Gracey Review

Today’s the day, folks… this five-year anniversary of this blog’s inception. According to About.com, traditional gift ideas for a fifth anniversary include airline tickets or a cruise. I’m just saying.

When I started this blog on April 17, 2002, I was 22 years old, married, living in Athens, and about to finish my undergraduate degree. I was using a 350mhz Sawtooth G4 tower, which was a really nice computer and which I still miss sometimes. There was no such thing as podcasting. There were very few blogging tools available, and the ones that were available were pretty clunky, so a homegrown system was obviously the way to go. Plus it gave me an opportunity to practice (and improve, over the years) my PHP skills.

But now, five years later, in commemoration of this milestone, guess what I’m doing? I’m moving to WordPress. I never thought the day would come! And I bet you didn’t either, readers. I have to say, when I was messing with WordPress last week, getting the new site ready, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the WordPress back-end code looks a lot like my code. Only difference is WordPress has more of it consolidated into functions (which makes sense).

I’m switching to WordPress not because it’s the hip thing to do, but because I was happy to continue using my homegrown system until I began to feel limited by it. And, in the past few months, that’s what has happened. There are capabilities I’d like to have - for example, tagging - that I don’t have with my system. Sure, I could write that stuff into my system, but why reinvent the wheel? I don’t have time, and I’m past the point of trying to “prove” my PHP/MySQL programming capabilities to myself.

So, without further ado - the new site is (drumroll) beingamberrhea.com. Please update your links!

You can grab the new RSS feed at http://www.beingamberrhea.com/feed. Alternately, if you don’t want to get my daily del.icio.us and Twitter updates, you can subscribe to http://www.beingamberrhea.com/category/blog/feed for actual blog posts only.

The old site will remain for posterity and reference, but after a few days I will disable comments.

I look forward to seeing y’all around here!

Today’s the day, folks… this five-year anniversary of this blog’s inception. According to About.com, traditional gift ideas for a fifth anniversary include airline tickets or a cruise. I’m just saying.

When I started this blog on April 17, 2002, I was 22 years old, married, living in Athens, and about to finish my undergraduate degree. I was using a 350mhz Sawtooth G4 tower, which was a really nice computer and which I still miss sometimes. There was no such thing as podcasting. There were very few blogging tools available, and the ones that were available were pretty clunky, so a homegrown system was obviously the way to go. Plus it gave me an opportunity to practice (and improve, over the years) my PHP skills.

But now, five years later, in commemoration of this milestone, guess what I’m doing? I’m moving to WordPress. I never thought the day would come! And I bet you didn’t either, readers. I have to say, when I was messing with WordPress last week, getting the new site ready, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the WordPress back-end code looks a lot like my code. Only difference is WordPress has more of it consolidated into functions (which makes sense).

I’m switching to WordPress not because it’s the hip thing to do, but because I was happy to continue using my homegrown system until I began to feel limited by it. And, in the past few months, that’s what has happened. There are capabilities I’d like to have - for example, tagging - that I don’t have with my system. Sure, I could write that stuff into my system, but why reinvent the wheel? I don’t have time, and I’m past the point of trying to “prove” my PHP/MySQL programming capabilities to myself.

So, without further ado - the new site is (drumroll) beingamberrhea.com. Please update your links!

You can grab the new RSS feed at http://www.beingamberrhea.com/feed. Alternately, if you don’t want to get my daily del.icio.us and Twitter updates, you can subscribe to http://www.beingamberrhea.com/category/blog/feed for actual blog posts only.

This site will remain for posterity and reference, but after a few days I will disable comments.

See y’all at the new place…!

Yes, I sent out an evite for a birthday party for my blog. Yes, I’m a nerd of ever-increasing degrees.

There will be cupcakes. A good time will be had by all.

Also, next Tuesday (the milestone day!), there will be some changes ’round these parts. Stay tuned.

And just like that, it’s my blog’s 4th birthday. I haven’t been able to think of anything to do to celebrate, aside from putting “Four more years!” as my subtitle, so there you go. Tonight I’ll probably go to Publix and get myself one of their yellow cakes with chocolate icing and a cherry on top. Yes, a whole cake. A slice wouldn’t do, because I almost always get one whenever I go to Publix anyway, to reward myself for going grocery shopping.

I don’t know what to write, either. So I guess this kind of sucks as a “momentous blogging anniversary” post. On his blog’s 3rd birthday (I waffle between using “birthday” and “anniversary;” both work), Patrick wrote a post about what he’d learned in three years of blogging. I feel like I should do someting similar, but I don’t know what to say. Maybe that means I haven’t learned anything.

Actually, I’ve learned plenty; I just don’t know how to describe it without boring everyone, and I really don’t have much time right now anyway. Oh! I know what, I’ll quote from my ill-fated essay submission for She Is Such A Geek.

I’ve been blogging for almost four years now, and at this point I’ve embraced it as a significant part of who I am. I feel confident enough now to say, “fuck that noise” to anyone who would scoff at it. There are still plenty of people out there who view blogging as an isolating activity, one that hinders the ability to form healthy relationships in real life. But I’ve found the polar opposite to be true.

Immersing myself in the world of blogging has exposed me to ideas and experiences I never would’ve had otherwise, and has helped me grow as a writer and a person. Blogging encourages introspection, and as such, has led me to think more carefully about what I believe and why. It has forced me to examine the reasons behind my actions and thoughts. It has helped me to strengthen my viewpoints and gain the confidence to explain and defend them with intelligence and grace. I believe this process to be constructive for others, as well - whether readers relate to or disagree with what’s written, the dialogue is half the point. Blogs make it possible for all us Average Janes to tell our personal stories and connect those experiences to issues on a larger scale.

And let’s not forget, without this blog I never would’ve met Rusty, or the trivia crew, or gotten back in touch with Dipika and Dacia, or co-founded the Georgia Podcast Network, or… the list goes on and on!

Obligatory observation of change: When I started this blog, I was a senior in college and married. A lot can change in four years!

Commence confetti, balloons, and a stripper popping out of a cake.

Update: Pictures! Hell yes, I got my cake. (Unfortunately I didn’t think to buy candles to put on it; oh well.) And just as I described earlier, it had a cherry on top, in true Publix bakery fashion.

…will be my blog’s 4th birthday. Finally it’s wearing big girl pants. How should I (we!) celebrate?

In recognition of my blog’s third birthday, Chris was nice enough to dump the data from the old database onto my Dreamhost space, and I put up a front end to view it here. You can’t leave comments or anything; it’s for historic purposes only. Apparently I was wrong in remembering the exact date of my blog’s birth; it was April 17th, not April 22nd. I’ve been reading the entries from summer of 2002 and they’re tearing me up inside.

Friday will be my blog’s third birthday (or anniversary, whichever term you prefer). Yes, I know the archives only go back to May 2004, but from April 2002 to May 2004 I was using a different database. I keep meaning to dump that database from Rockhopper onto my Dreamhost account and put up a quick-and-dirty front end. Maybe I’ll do that tonight. Anyway… three years. Wow. Make a wish and blow out the candles. Or something.