The World of Stuff .com

What TWoS Means to Me

While I’m busy entertaining a guest, Peter Hurford satiates your hunger for stuff with this site’s first guest post in two and a half years.

Hi! I’m Peter Hurford. I run the amazing website Greatplay.net, which Jordon sometimes links to — for example in this post and then in this post, and in that fancy blogroll in the sidebar.

I actually asked Jordon to let me guest post because I was bored, but apparently he is — quote — “not sure when [he'll] have time to write a post next”. So you ended up with me or nothing. And I’m hoping you prefer me over nothing. Feel free to compare me to the other guest posts if you want to know how I’m doing.

Actually, that was more of a demand. You WILL prefer me over nothing. I’m hoping the lack of any serious competition (from Jordon during this week, not from the other guest posts) will get my demand off the ground.

Anyways, the fact is that I like The World of Stuff a lot, and it really motivated me to bring my own blog off the ground. I vaguely remember stumbling upon it because of The Ultimate Cool Characters back in 2005ish, about 2 or 3 tWoS web redesigns ago. I had my own Greatplay.net back then and it was about 50% more personal and 75% less updated than it is now.

I got involved with The World of Stuff directly when I asked for a link exchange, back when friendly link exchanges were considered “cool”. I ended up in his sidebar (which now contains many blogs), and he ended up in mine (which used to contain two blogs, and now doesn’t exist.) For some reason, Greatplay.net was then doing very well traffic-wise (something that I can’t seem to recapture) while tWoS ended up staying about even. Jordon then asked me for advice! (Of course, today, the tables are turned.)

In 2007, I was behind in technology in keeping up with TWoS. Jordon had this cool thing called PLAPS which, while no longer defined on the site anywhere (as far as I can tell) used to be a script that would allow you to write posts ahead of time and then suspend them, scheduling them to not appear to the public until later. This allowed one to develop content on a regular schedule while secretly writing nearly everything on weekends, or seem to post while secretly on vacation. I wanted to try to use PLAPs. But by then, Jordon had already discovered WordPress, something I had never heard of!

I then sat around for some more years and then relaunched my site with WordPress on March 2009, more or less the way it is now. For those that don’t know, WordPress is a blogging software that lets you run a blog on your site without having to script the entire system by yourself (which would take weeks). I also got the idea for Ask Jordon, pretty much stolen, but with a nice link on my site. I, however, gave Jordon the idea of “Jordon Asks You” (except he gave it the cool Russian Reversal name). So I guess it’s pretty much even, assuming “Jordon Asks You” still ran, which it does not.

But the end of the story is that if it wasn’t for Jordon, I probably would never have WordPress, I would never have Ask Peter, and I would likely never have the blog I have today.

Therefore, I blame Jordon entirely for my lack of success.

And you can blame Jordon for the existence of this post.

Thank you.