3621625591_dc0a8063d6_mIt’s been three years since my first post ‘Starting In Medias Res‘ and to celebrate three years of blogging here on Storybookperfect.com I’m going to share with you some of the ways I’ve changed over the last three years.

Well of course, first up I’ve been published. I’ve won a local writing competition, been a finalist in a national award, and have an honourable mention in an international competition. I’ve also racked up plenty of rejections too.

I remember I used to read all the spam comments to check and see if a legit person had been erroneously filtered in. Now if I went through and read the 600 odd comments that appear daily I’d have another 100 to read by the time I went through them. If the filter took your comment sorry, but she’s gone ;p

I’ve discovered the ‘joys’ of spending twenty minutes tinkering with a widget or a page improving it in ways that most people probably will never notice.

And for the start of my fourth year here’s four things I promise never to do:

  1. Those stupid ads, positioned right beside a link you need to click so you accidentally click the ad thus giving me money and you frustration(and maybe a virus to top it off).
  2. Speaking of ads, those ones where Google algorithms try to tailor the ad that appears to what you’ve looked at recently, but only ever seems to show a website you just visited.
  3. Spreading information (or gags) across multiple pages so you have to click next to keep reading the one article. This is a cheap tactic used to get more hits per day so Google ranks you higher
  4. Make my mailing list sign-up form appear as a pop-up mini-window over my website. These annoy me because even when I have signed up to the mailing list, when I visit the site again later it prompts me again. If you want to join my mailing list I’ll be setting it up very soon (still working on the freebie), and it will always and ever live in my sidebar, never in pop up windows.

Well. Here’s to three years done and a multitude more yet to come 😀