by First, I want to wish a happy 11th blogoversary to Prof. David Yamane who started his great Gun Culture 2.0 blog 11 years ago today. It is one of those must read blogs in the gun culture.
The second blogoversary I wish to acknowledge is my own. I had forgotten about it until I saw David’s post. I started this blog on Blogger on May 20, 2010 making this blog 13 years old. I have since moved to WordPress thanks to a scare I got in 2019 when I suddenly got canceled by Google for a supposed violation of their terms of service. Fortunately, that was resolved in my favor, I was able to rescue my old posts, and I moved on.
Looking back at that first post, I can now say things that I couldn’t at the time. I spent a bit over 25 years working as a financial advisor for a firm that specialized in group retirement for the non-profit and governmental sectors. I did hold the Certified Financial Planner™ designation for 20 years until I voluntarily relinquished it at the end of April given I had retired. When I was told that I had to declare the blog as an “outside business activity” after many years of just muddling along, I had to go back and change some earlier posts due to demands from our compliance department. Go figure.
I sadly recognize that the golden age of blogging is probably over. Many of the great gun bloggers of that era such as Sebastian and Say Uncle have moved on with their lives. I owe a great debt to both of them as their links to me drove a ton of traffic my way. Others such as Weerd, Alan, Breda, and JayG have moved on to podcasting. JayG, like Tom McHale at American Handgunner, moved on to be an editor of an actual magazine. In Jay’s case, it was as Executive Editor of Shooting Illustrated. Fortunately, some of the great bloggers of the era such as Tam, Miggy, Old NFO, David Codrea, and Kevin Baker are still at it. Indeed, Kevin hit his 20th blogoversary less than 10 days ago!
While Instagram and YouTube “influencers” get the traffic now, I plan to stick with blogging as my primary activity with co-hosting on the Polite Society Podcast as the side gig. I don’t see any reason to change as I am still enjoying this. Besides, we need citizen journalists as it is called by David Codrea.