Birthday Post – A Brief History of Jinx!

Author: nova

Yes, I am pleased to announce that my blog Jinx! is now about two years old. I say “about” because the exact date on which the blog started is unknown due to missing e-mails and long deleted posts. Since it was somewhere around this time when I got the idea of starting a blog and wrote up a few articles just to see how it goes, I decided to pick the 1st of May as the blog’s birthday. Last year I barely bothered mentioning this happy event but this time I saw fit to dedicate an entire post to it, also taking the opportunity to shed some light on the murky past of the site.

Jinx! started under a title “NovaJinx’s rant blog” somewhere in May 2007 which seemed to have been sort of a crazy season of anime blogging, only intended for personal rants about how everyone and their grandmother sucks. Most of the posts from that time have been either deleted or marked private but there are a few around for public view as warning examples. The idea for blogging in the first place came to me when I was googling around for some anime-themed wallpapers and happened to stumble upon bj0rn’s blog – before which I had considered all blogs as uninformative and uninteresting lairs of cam/attentionwhore faggotry. But after following the links and exploring the Animeblogger.net community I grew interested in blogging. As a long-term IRC-user I also found my way to #animeblogger although I remained mostly inactive until the following autumn. Inspired but knowing little about anime as a subject, I decided to start a blog about random shit to improve my english writing skills for an exchange term in the United States.

I have no stats left prior to November 2007 but for the first four months or so of operation the average views in a day was 3. Towards the end of 2007 I became more involved with the IRC-circles of AB.net and ditched personal rant texts in favor of anime-themed posts. November 2007 was a turning point in several ways as I decided go for blogging more seriously and move out of free WP.org hosting. I ordered a hosting package from Neobitti and registered for .fi-domain (paid three first years in advance too), which came into operation on 25th of November. As you can see, socializing with other bloggers and engaging in more rigorous link whorage on IRC paid for itself and the site saw substantial growth in pageviews over the course of the following spring.

The stop came in May 2008 when I moved back home from the United States and almost immediately started working as a lumberjack, having to live in an old cabin with no internet connection. The work absorbed all my energy and thus the blogging activity came to a halt. After a while I got a better job for a gas company which involved traveling all over the country but this changed nothing as far as blog activity was concerned – although I was quite surprised to see that even when posting nothing my site would rack up about 1600 views monthly.

In September 2008 work finally ended and I began my junior year at the university. As I moved to an apartment and once again had more than enough spare time without blue-collar work to leech all my energy, I wasted no time in getting Jinx! back up and running. Maybe a summer-long hiatus was a good idea after all because I was able to start with a whole new prospect and did two things I should have already done long since: 1) Stop using the WP default site layout and 2) register for aggregate sites – and the effects of the latter can be clearly seen on the graph as the pageviews quickly more than doubled. I also decided to try out the ever-so-popular episodic blogging and while Chaos;HEAd as a show turned out to be a massive drag, blogging it brought me clear benefits as far as pageviews are concerned. There is little to say about the rest aside from the very nice growth in popularity Jinx! has managed to attain, considering its humble roots. From the table below you can see that year 2009 has already exceeded 2008 in total views. Since the blog’s reactivation in September 2008 it has gone from 50 daily views to about 250. It is a tiny number compared to the blogging behemoths out there but personally I find this development very rewarding and look forward to breaking the magical line of 500 daily views. At the time of writing this Jinx! has accumulated close to 60 000 total views.

This all said, this coming summer will hardly be an exception as far as activity is concerned although I will do my best to stay at least somewhat active until my senior year at the university begins. Thanks for your attention. Now for nostalgia and the good of public education, let me post a picture that reminds me of my first visit to #animeblogger…