I’m actually a few days late on this, since my first post was on July 13th 2004, but at least I didn’t miss it entirely. I remembered on the day itself, but haven’t till now had the time to craft a retrospective worthy of such a momentous occasion.

Yes, it really is true. A whole year has passed since I began this humble enterprise, since I found a new and exciting outlet for my inexplicable, uncontrollable urge to fritter hours into the ether. Sitting idle last Summer, I determined to hone my HTML skills by constructing a personal homepage, to which the blog was added as something of an afterthought. Recently it has become a diary of my activities and day-to-day life, but at first it was far more bizarre and random, with posts coverings such diverse topics as a sensational new sport and a German marksman. Fortunately I seem to have found some semblance of sanity since those early, hedonistic days.

A little known fact is that I actually began my first blog in February ’03, but it was very short lived and is now lost to the world (or rather wisely deleted). I’ve discovered that the key to a rewarding blogging experience is to read the blogs of other people, which I never did first time round, and hope that they then come and visit yours. I guess the egotist in me (who enjoys writing tales of my life for the world to peruse) doesn’t quite see the point if nobody takes the appropriate amount of notice. I had a few abortive attempts at keeping a daily diary as a child, but soon got bored with the whole idea. I never trusted the privacy of it enough to write anything even vaguely personal, and it became a perilously prosaic account of how “I did this, and then did that. After tea I did that again, before doing something else.”

Here certain of my college friends would no doubt say I haven’t broken from this pattern, but I hope that wouldn’t be true. At the very least, a newly increased tendency toward exaggeration has tempered the comatose inducing anecdotes of my youth, and there are a select handful of heroic people returning to read these pages regularly. I may not have a large readership, but I’d like to think it is of high quality. Who needs a million nutcases when I’ve got you guys?

With a little organisation I could have rigged things so that this was also my 100th post, but instead it is only number 97. (Irritatingly my blogging software is miles out of sync, giving this a post ID of 199, but that’s because of the countless test posts I’ve done at different times. Actually, not countless. Rather easy to calculate. But I digress…) In my previous 96 posts, I have written 32,246 words, whilst you lovely people have left 7,706 words in 201 comments. (Actually of course around half those comments were me, but I do like to be polite and reply. It’s not just me trying to boost my comment count to appear more popular. Really, it’s not.)

A brief word about the name, since it is rather bizarre. It came from the original design of my website, which featured my disembodied head in the top corner, grinning and staring somewhat disconcertingly (a precursor to my current incarnation as a cross between the sun from the Teletubbies and an Oompa-Loompa deity). My unholy visage obviously had a profound effect on one early reader, who shunned the original title ‘Blog-based Procrastination’ and linked to my site with the wonderfully enigmatic and alliterative ‘Fyse’s Floating Face’. Kudos to Dan (aka Mr Moxie), on whom I bestow the title ‘blogfather’, whether he likes it or not.

Now I have purchased the floatingface.com domain my blog has a permanent home, hopefully for years to come. I read some bloggers who have been posting for as many as six years, and I wonder whether I will still be hear, tapping away on my keyboard so far into the future. The great thing about this blogging lark is the reciprocated reading and the online communities it creates, and I expect I’ll continue to update this site as long as there are people reading it. So, in true over-emotional Oscar-speech style, I’d like to thank most of all you, the public. Or rather, that small subset with sufficient masochistic tendencies to keep revisiting this godforsaken backwater of the world wide web…