Birthday cake
Birthday cake by Tom-Tom on Flickr

As I mentioned earlier this week, yesterday was the first blogversary for See Also…. I guess this is a low-key celebration, not a multimedia extravaganza like some people put on for their blog’s anniversary.

I had originally hoped to celebrate with a big redesign of the site, or at least with a re-working of the archives index. But no. No time.

I was going to do a little look back over the past year, but I don’t know how interesting it would be for anyone who isn’t me.

I did create a new blog page that contains every single post to See Also… on one web page, complete with comments. I left it mostly unstyled for printing, and even created a pdf of See Also…, year one (6.6 MB, 121 pages long. Think twice before printing!). I also backed the thing up; true believers can download a text file of the year’s work, suitable for importing to Movable Type (and with the Creative Commons license on this blog, you can do that if for some strange reason you really want to). I know most people won’t want to download those files, but I thank you if you do: lots of copies keep stuff safe, as they say.

I’ll spare you all the stats but one: word count (excluding titles and comments and categories and the like): 60,717. Yikes.

Here are a few of my favorite posts from the last year:

Writing this blog has exceeded all my expectations, both in the intrinsic value of writing and sharing and in the way the blog has opened up new connections and opportunities for me.

Writing this blog has led to what I now think of as my “imaginary friends” (I suppose the more dignified term would be “invisible college”): those people with whom my interactions have been either mostly or entirely electronic in nature (email, IM, blog comments, etc.) and whom I have “met” because I choose to participate in the world of library blogging. With these imaginary friends, I have traded drafts of articles and book chapters, troubleshot CSS or HTML problems, commiserated, conferred, and conspired.

Thanks, invisible friends. Thanks, readers.