Just a little over a year ago the Walker launched its first blog – this one! It was soon followed by several departmental blogs and the behind the scenes grab-bag known as “Off Center”… In this first year we’ve seen our blogs grow from an unsure project (“Let’s just start blogging and see what happens! Who wants to write?”) to a pretty important part of the Walker’s web presence (“Hmm, maybe we need to draft some guidelines for these blogs…”). It’s been a fun road from my side: WordPress was hacked once because I was late with an upgrade, we lost some posts and had to scramble with the backups to recover them, and the battle with comment spam is ongoing (but we think we’re winning finally).
I think two people deserve an extra shout-out for their incredible impact on bringing this project to where it is today: Eric, for his design work, incredible WordPress wizardry, patience in teaching staff how to blog, and actually posting when the rest of New Media just talks about it, and Paul, for his total commitment to the blogs, great (frequent!) posts, and for raising the bar on what we want them to be.
Here’s to one year down, many more to go!