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Sunday, January 27, 2008

Blog Birthday Coming Up...

Seen Through A Glass will celebrate its one year anniversary on Thursday, January 31st. One year ago I opened with this post, and with very little thought beforehand -- I thought up the name of the blog while I was writing the post, having suddenly realized it should have a name -- laid out these goals:
I'll be using this for quick stuff. Mostly, to start with, STAG is going to be a place to start up my Session Beer Project (more on that shortly). So I'll be doing a lot more quick tasting notes and short rants, as that hits me. It's going to be as informal as "The Latest" is...okay, was on my site, when I was keeping up with it. The idea for the blog is short, sharp, and frequent writing. I want to keep up on local stuff, too: local to southeast PA and the adjoining states. I dropped the ball on local news last year, and I want to get back up to speed; here's where it's happening.

How'd I do? Pretty well, so far.

Session Beer Project: currently a bit low, but the SBP was definitely a success, with mentions in several publications (notably the recent Imbibe article on session beers and in Eric Asimov's New York Times blog, The Pour) and great response from brewers and drinkers. I've committed to revving that back up, and you'll see that.

Tasting Notes: Over 50 beer and whiskey and cider notes posted so far, and I'm falling into a new format for them -- I call it "The New York Review of Beers style -- that I like. I'm going to get the "tasting note" tag on all of them, too, so you can -- if you want... -- find them easier. (Did that, and there turns out to be 71, counting the ones embedded in other posts.)

Short rants: could do better on this one. I'm happy with the ranting I've done, but I could do more.

"The Latest": Probably the most successful part of the blog, I've posted a lot of bar and brewery reports. Probably the most annoying part of the blog: I've been bad about completing multi-day trips and visits. I'll work on that.

Local news: Better, but I'm still working on that.

What I would like to do, and it's a bit quixotic, is get 365 posts on the board before January 30 is over, to bring my average up to a post a day. This is post #349, so I've got 16 posts to do in four days, while keeping up with a fair amount of scheduled, paying work. Certainly doable...the hard part is making them worthwhile! Expect some long-delayed tasting notes, the completion of the Colum Egan interview, and -- with luck -- some site reports.

Buckle up.

4 comments:

Alan said...

Hey Lew! Congratulations. You know, I am coming up on the fifth anniversary of my first beer blog post in May but that predates the creation of my stand alone beer blog on 23 October 2004, two days before my first post about your writing.

I've never gone back and checked out the mission statement (I don't really think I had one) as you are doing above but I am intrigued now by the reference on 22 October to the Quill and Tankard Awards and the North American Guild of Beer Writers. Were you part of that group? Has the advent of the beer blog explosion and other forms of mass beer writing changed us and moved us past the point of a NAGBW?

Lew Bryson said...

It's actually my fifth anniversary too, Alan: I started my website in January of 2003. I mostly went to the blog last year because 1)Verizon was getting really pissy about the e-mail newsletter I was sending out; and 2) because Stan kept telling me I should. "Mission statement", heh, it was more like me thinking out loud about what I was going to write about!

I was a member of NAGBW, and won a couple of the awards, and no, I don't think that the beer blog explosion has "changed us" so that there's no point to a 'guild' of some sorts. I'm ready to start a new one.

Alan said...

Done! Where do we sign up and do the executive get to wear fancy hats?

Anonymous said...

10 and counting! Good luck!