One year on and 250 blog entries later …

As I sat down to write today’s blog entry I realised that it is exactly a year since I started. During that time I have made two hundred and forty nine blog entries – this is the two hundredth and fiftieth – and my blog seems to be reasonably popular with readers as it is currently averaging over one hundred ‘hits’ per day.

Has it turned out the way I expected?

Not quite.

In my first blog I wrote that:

I intend to share my thoughts on wargaming (and other related matters that crop up) with a wider audience ... probably much to the relief of my wife and wargaming colleagues. So watch this space ... and come prepared to be bored!

I had not realised how much writing down my thoughts about wargaming would spur me on to actually ‘do something’ rather than just ‘think about doing something’. Having written it down I felt obliged to do it. It has – as a result – been a great spur to my wargaming.

Secondly, I had not realised how much the comments from the people who read my blog would encourage me to ‘get things done’. It is very difficult to not finish a set of wargames rules that you have said that you are writing when there are people out there who want to read and try them!

Thirdly, I had not realised how big the blogging community was and that I would end up looking at what other wargaming bloggers were writing at least once per day – and how much I would find it so interesting!

One year on and I find that my wargaming projects over the past year have included:

• The ‘Nostalgia’ Project (and the related but as yet still hazy imagi-nation of Opeland)
• The creation of a back-history and maps for the imagi-nation of Laurania
• The development of a generic set of late 19th/early 20th century rules that use a battlefield that is gridded into squares – WHEN EMPIRES CLASH!
• Writing a set of operational-level rules for the Eastern Front, and explaining how I went about designing them to meet my specific requirements
• Buying TABLE TOP BATTLES – and my development of them for other historical periods – all of which contributed so much to the previous two projects
• Helping Richard Brooks to develop SOLFERINO IN TWENTY (later THIRTY) MINUTES
• Developing an existing set of World War II wargames rules into RED FLAGS AND IRON CROSSES – TARRED AND FEATHERSTONED; without my blog these have remained just an idea and not a reality (and would not, therefore, have been included in the reprint of Donald Featherstone’s WARGAMING AIRBORNE OPERATIONS)
• Writing (and blogging about writing) REDCOATS AND NATIVES – TARRED AND FEATHERSTONED, which did much to resurrect my somewhat moribund interest in colonial wargaming

That is quite a lot to have done in twelve months, even though I say it myself!

So where to next?

I don't know ... but I am looking forward to finding out!