After a whole week of inactivity to settle my accommodation and air tickets to Lisbon and Los Angeles, I popped into the administration only to find a very strange sight. Two days ago, we hit 1000 posts with Calawain’s entry on Mai Otome. I wanted to steal all the glory from everyone by making this post on the 1000th position, but was ninja-ed.

Sadly, life just does not seem to work that perfectly and I have to do an entry 2 days after the millennium post. Nonetheless, considering I am the oldest blogger here in THAT Anime Blog, it’s time to bring you to a journey on the first millennium of THAT Anime Blog, as we close this world and open the next.

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THAT Past

After a day filled with eye-burning staring contests with my computer monitor, the basic setup for THAT Blog is finally finished. We are finally settled down (layout wise) for a good while. We are still getting some writers to sign, but all-in-all, the site is done.

And thus. . we can finally launch, lol. Thank god, I don’t think I can stare at script any longer. XD

I’d like to extend a warm thanks to Maestro from Animeblogger.net for providing us with this wonderful opportunity to host a customized wordpress blog on the Animeblogger.net site. We hope to go from our small beginnings and thrive into an active anime blog akin to the many giants in the wired today.

So without furtherado…

-Mr. Admin

THAT Anime Blog is born through a random YIM chat on July 27th 2006. I did not expect anything since it’s simply idle talk. I mean, who expects anything to miraculously happen after some random chat about anime blogs? Thirteen days later, everything is set up by Mr Admin. It is on August 10th, 2006 that THAT Anime Blog is born into the infant anime blogosphere. Honestly, I still miss Mr Admin or Dandan who is the true founder of this blog. Without his resourceful endeavors to find a kind host like animeblogger.net, I will never make the effort to have such an anime blog.

We did not really have a direction for the blog and traffic is found wanting. I still remember that there are a ton of huge anime blogs out there. We are just one of the many small blogs, struggling to even get 10 visitors a day. I tried to ask some prominent anime blogs for a blog link but I was given the cold shoulder more often than not. It is painful for an upstart, but I simply shrugged it off as real life elitism manifesting in real life. We just have to depend on ourselves to survive.

For many, anime blogging is simply an interest. However, for me, I want to share it to as many people as I possibly could. I want many people to come in, comment and share ideas/thoughts/beliefs with me. I thought of ways to do it and arrived with verbal diarrhoea in blogging as an answer. I blog like a total lunatic, posting more than three times per day.

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THAT Progress

I also remember the euphoria when we finally hit 1000 pageviews on sitemeter. It is almost like insane celebration from me, Alkanphel and Jooo because it represents a milestone for the blog. We went batshit insane when Ghost Hunt entries become extremely popular. It’s quite ironic that the blog currently receives around 4500-5000 visitors per day and I am not even half bothered. It’s not that it’s nothing, but I guess I prefer comments now. My excitement is the greatest during the early days of blogging. I will be lying if I say that my passion is still as strong when I first started, but I guess a bit of maturity (read: laziness/drained out) sat in.

It is around November or December 2006 that I started recruiting people. I decide that I want to make this blog as popular as I can, and the only way is to increase the activity of posts in the blog. I know that I need to find people who write differently from me. In other words, I am trying my best to create different viewpoints in the blog for an “aggregator” of sorts. Stumbling here and creating new ideas, we continue to find a direction for the blog. I do not know whether we do have a concrete goal to achieve, but THAT probably fits in the vision of how I want it to be: An aggregator of various thoughts, themes and ideas that are uncontrolled and unrestricted by anyone.

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THAT Now

Today, the stats read as such.

There are currently 1,003 posts and 16,768 comments, contained within 92 categories.

It’s insane. No one, including me, expected the blog to be that popular. Many anime blogs out there hardly receive any comments (or even views) for their entries, and I really thank everyone for loving THAT Anime Blog to bother leaving an entry. After 1000 posts, I take away some important lessons.

• Appreciate every single commentator - Some of my authors do not agree with me, but I appreciate every single commentator that is legitimate. Whether they are simply saying “Thank you for blogging”, flaming me, trolling or writing a verbose discussion about humanity, they are all loved. Some bloggers are dismissive of stupid comments by random visitors, but I appreciate them. There are too many of you to mention individually, but I will say this. You guys, compared to the other 99% of visitors, bothered to leave a mark in this space.

 

• Getting used to people leaving - Crusader stayed. Calawain stayed. Extrange stayed. Lupus stayed. Many left. It’s really hard sometimes that people leave after a few entries but that is the reality of recruiting total strangers. I realize not to feel so heartbroken when a blogger suddenly disappears. They have their lives, I have mine. Sometimes, it’s better to let go.

 

• Never ignore requests - As I have been rejected by prominent anime bloggers for blogrolls, I never reject anyone unless it’s clearly a spam site. I do not believe in selection of qualities because everyone has a right to ask. I make sure I always reply to emails (check our contact form). There is no place for elitism here. No, never and never will be.

 

• Giving advice for starting - We are probably one of the few anime blogs that have written more than two entries about how to start up. They included advice on “entries to write during burn out“, “predicting a good anime“, “the dilemma of an anime reviewer“, the background story of anime blogging“, “brainstorming ideas for topics to write“, “chronological time line of anime blogging” and “how to get viewers to your blog“. I believe that the joys of anime blogging far outweigh the troubles. That is why I am still writing.

I definitely did not expect myself to write such a long entry. I guess it’s just realizing how long we have moved since our humble beginnings. Thank you once again for making THAT a place that is loved, hated or simply there.

It’s you, the visitors, who brought us where we are.

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