Notes from a first-time blogger.

June 8, 2006: Decide to blog.
June 9: Blog published. Wow. That was easy. Dawns on me that the future of web design –well engineering at least–is again up in the air.
June 12: Post first blogs. Two blogettes. Or is that blogiments? Receive first comment from Hugh, who sits across from me at Mortar. Discover Hugh also records his wife talking in her sleep  and publishes the files on his own blog. Am struck by fact that I would never have known had I not blogged first. You can hear him shushing her in the recordings.
June 14: Janey tells me to post more pictures.
June 17: Discover other ad blogs. Decide Janey is right (isn’t she always). Steal pictures from other blogs. Am stricken with guilt until I realize that everyone else does that too. Nevertheless resolve to be original. Pictures added to blog. I go back and edit some material too.
June 18: Add first 100% original material: take photo of bus shelter outside my house and post it to the web. Feel great sense of accomplishment. PM Wife reads blog. Pronounces the whole thing silly and goes to bed. Threaten rest of team with death unless they add blog to sig line in emails.
June 19: Write first "in a series of" blog. Route blog for discussion. Milestone: 3 readers. Strongly suspect all 3 readers are me.
June 20: Conduct some Internet Voodoo. Hope my expertise in the dark arts will send me more blog traffic. Hit the blog a lot. Still at 3 visitors.
June 21: Nick the Planner wants in on the blog. Add Scooby Doo as a great dane. Worry that my Danish clients will disown me. Worry even more than it is now significant that my clients are Danish.
June 22: Decide that most ad blogs are misogynistic. Send biggest client to check out blog inadvertently. First thing she sees is a giant column sheathed in a pink condom. She bangs out "Mary has a Little Lamb" on the Sundown girls. Nice one.
June 22: Still no feedback on routed blog. Getting feedback blows.
June 22: Start diary of Blog. 9 readers now. Fairly sure its all colleagues.
June 26: Post answer to first brain teaser. No one wins the grand prize. Also post, then unpublish, a blog about click fraud. It marks the first blog apoproved by a client–and with the potential to piss off other clients. Post stays down while I sleep on the issue.
June 27: Post new brainteaser. Am flamed over the answer to the first one by a client. Post article about click fraud. Discover Coolhunter.net. Man is that site racy. Alexa ranks Mortablog at 856,796. Our two agency sites have Alexa ranks of 638,566 and 4,169,114. The Blog already gets more traffic than one of our sites that has been up for several years. Realize that each post is a separate traffic generator–as it gets indexed by search engines it draws a new audience. Never thought of it that way before. Keep thinking of Blogs like newspapers and Webpages, and imaging users coming in via the homepage.  Funny how hard it is to shake off the blinkers. Another 100,000 and I can make the top 25 ad blogs on BeyondMadisonAvenue. Cool.
June 28: Alexa rank drops t0 1,053,000. Weird. We lose 50% of traffic overnight.
June 29 5pm: Alexa has us at 748,104 now.
July 10: 584,694 alexa. Added cheesey attribution to each original post. Let’s see what happens. Traffic today was: totale page views 993; 30.09 PVs a day.
Added three posts: shilled for 0b10 (colleagues shocked by the insensitivity of my headlines, client too has no sense of humor over post, decide I over did it, and water it down. Also posted notes on good briefs and a commentary on healthcare comms (sparked by our win of San Francisco’s St Mary’s Medical Center).
July 16: Alexa at 550,000 or so.
July 17 or so: Ask PR to proof the posts. As we’re publishing for the world to see it might as well be accurate.
July 24: Alexa at 458,914. 20% increase in traffic in just 8 days. Publish Nick’s B2B post. Nick tells me two of his friends read the blog. Its official. We have readers outside of Mortar.
August 18: disappear on vacation to Florence. Blog content suffers mightily. Who the hell blogs from Italy? Alexa rank remians unchanged. Well I guess that means we have not lost readers, and that most of the traffic is not me.
August 25: Receive two fresh submissions. One from Nick on the paucity of B2B advertising (inspired by our new client, Isilon’s kick-ass attitude to Storage and how they want to do things) and one from Will Kim, the Takewondo BlackBelt from Anaheim (resident AE). Will’s post focuses on using Improv theater troupes for guerilla marketing. Cool idea. Mortar moves to new digs.
September 1: Alexa at 402,908. Will still hasn’t posted his submission.  Screenshot of current traffic:

The post about Crispin’s Backseat driver manual has been very popular.