April 1st marks the one year anniversary of Fire Up Today. It has been an incredible journey with many hills and valleys along the way. I am grateful to all of you who visit here regularly. Your comments and feedback make life much richer and more exciting. I would like to say thank you to the bloggers who inspired me to get into this daily ritual. I have learned so much and met so many new friends. Thank you!
A little over a year ago I had picked up the book “Getting Things Done”, by David Allen. The book had a profound impact on my perception of time management and I started to do web searches on the topic. I found the site 43Folders by Merlin Mann and a little hack called the “Hipster PDA“… I was hooked. I noticed his site was called a “Blog”, and I found it easy to navigate and comment on. I picked up an Audio Book on blogging and the rest they say is… history.
I followed links on 43folders and one blog led to the next. I found the personal productivity site of Steve Pavlina and learned a lot of techniques for becoming more productive. His writing style and willingness to try things out made his site a daily read. A link on his site led me to “Slacker Manager“, by Brendon Connelley. I found that Bren had a unique outlook on life and his site had some of the most fascinating articles that I have ever read. I started to comment and get involved with this phenomenon called blogging.
From Bren’s site I found an amazing world of creativity and curiosity in Dwayne Melancon’s “Genuine Curiosity“. This site was full of wonderful treasures and gadgets. I bookmarked the site and followed his links to the island paradise known as Talking Story. Author and personal coach Rosa Say had created an amazing world of Hawaiian words and sayings and related them to business management. Her Ho’ohana community was rich and diverse and I found myself immersed in the collaborative atmosphere.
Her community links became the foundation of an inspiration to start blogging. The more I explored, the more I wanted to create my own destination. A place where I could share some of my ideas and experiences with others.
I finally took the plunge on April Fools day, 2005. Fire Up Today was born. A simple WordPress blog with a domain name that was derived from a powerful speech that I had experienced. I started writing about things that I found interesting and soon people were commenting and the blog induction was complete.
The rest of the year was a blur with many new blogs coming online and traffic steadily increasing. I soon found many interesting bloggers such as Keith Robinson, Troy Worman, and Jason Womack. Their sites led to other interesting online authors such as Phil Gerbyshak, Scott Hodge, and Erik Vossman. Yaro Starak has been a helpful friend through the journey with many site tips and tricks and the introduction into the amazing world of SEO.
The year was capped off by a worldwide book signing for Rosa Say with bloggers all over the world sending Rosa’s book back and forth for signatures. The book was battered and broken when she finally received it but the collaboration with so many people was an experience I will never forget.
As the year turned to 2006 a couple of posts on this site went ballistic being picked up by Lifehacker and Seth Godin. It was amazing to me that there was so much interest in 12 Habits and Marshmallow Madness but such is the world of blogging… You never know what people may find interesting.
I looked at the site stats and found that we had over 142,000 visits for the year and are now averaging pretty close to 1000 visits per day. This is pretty amazing coming from 150 visits for the first month. Blogging has changed my life and I want to say Thank You to all of you who stop by from time to time.
Continued success to all of you!
Cheers!
John
