The World of Stuff .com

500th post

Yes, it’s true. This is my five hundredth post on The World of Stuff.

I really don’t have much to say, except that I never dreamed I’d be posting this long. When I started this site on April 6, 2003, it was basically so that I could tell people I had a single home page instead of giving The Dvorak Keyboard and You and flipacoin.net as my web sites. Those two parts of the site predate TWoS itself (Make Your Own Spam Bait does too, but I wonder why I haven’t deleted it already). They are the reason I give the copyright date of TWoS as beginning in 2002 — I consider them parts of a single work (though I don’t know if that would stand in a court of law).

When I started the site, I was in the eighth grade at my happy little school. That summer, I was preparing to enter high school — it distressed me terribly — and that’s when the blogging started. Could it be that I started blogging as an outlet for my angst? No, I didn’t know angst back then. More likely it was summer boredom. In any case, TWoS has served as a record of my high school days. Slightly more than halfway through and I have 500 posts. I wonder if I can break 1,000 posts by the end of high school? (Probably not, as my daily free time has only decreased and will very soon be cut shorter.)

Originally I only posted about updates to the site. This eventually gave way to blog-type posting, which somewhere along the line evolved into full-fledged blogging. So while I may have started blogging later, I was posting from the very beginning. And that clears up that matter.

Where do I intend to take this site in the future? I’ve been studying The Sneeze and its owner, Steve, quite a bit. The site is younger than TWoS, and yet wildly popular by comparison. How does he do it? I’ve decided to break the site down to the cogs to see what makes it tick:

• Well, for starters, he’s funny. Which is not to say that I’m not funny.
• I think the professional web design job and assistance from artist friends might help.
• As Todd has told us, he tries to make it seem that he’s popular. See the next bullet.
• The next bullet. The Sneeze is “half zine” and “half blog.” In other words, it’s a blog that has regular “features” (such as Steve, Don’t Eat It! and Jokes from the Booster Seat) and ongoing storylines based on his wacky observations (like The Cheap-Ass Cereal Hall of Fame and PopCornspiracy). I’ve done similar things, though.
• He usually has the comments turned off, and that apparently adds a sense of distance from the reader, thus making him seem all the more inaccessible.
• There’s a store. I’ve always thought of having a WoS store, but would you buy World of Stuff stuff?
• Giveaways! He has contests and gives away stuff.
• There’s The Sneeze Mailbag, where he answers reader’s questions. I do Ask Jordon.
• He just interviewed one of the guys from that show MythBusters! I don’t know how, but he did it.

In conclusion, I think I’m going to have a stab at interviews. Maybe not guys from TV — how would I ever get in touch with them? — but moderately to lightly popular people from the Internet. It could be a monthly feature or something. And maybe I could have some contests. I’ve got some ideas runnin’ around in the ol’ brain…

But overall, I can’t see the site changing substantially in the future, so relax. The day I hire someone to redesign the site is the day you can officially stop reading and declare me insane. Also, thanks for your continued readership and support.

Now, for old times’ sake, you may wish to read the first post ever at TWoS. It’s not terribly interesting, but here it is.