Many happy returns

I started this blog on Friday 9 March 2007 so Happy Birthday to Shelf Appeal.

For me, blogging has been nothing other than interesting, fun and satisfying. It took me a long time to get this off the ground. Procrastination should be my middle name. I wanted it to look right. I wanted to write about things that inspired me, rather than things I was paid to write about. I wanted to write when it felt right and not tie myself down to the pressure of daily or even weekly posts. I wanted it to be ‘fit and proper’ as this birthday card for the Clarks shoes Lucky Two Club states. All in all I was, as the cliché goes, writing it to please myself.

But there has been a steady stream of visitors. Sudden spikes on Google Analytics let me know someone has found something they liked and linked through. It’s nice that only for a very few days has Shelf Appeal sat lonely, with no one reading it.

I have been happy for readers to stumble upon this blog. There is immense appeal in finding things on the internet from browsing random ideas and remembrances. Many visitors have come via Google images and I’m sure that is how I would have found it. It is constantly surprising to me that anyone wants to read this stuff. It’s mostly about obscure objects that get my visual antenna vibrating and my fingers typing. But if the internet does anything, it shows you how small the world is. That, no matter what it is you like, there is a website, blog or at the very least, a Flickr group out there about it.

At any point when I have been at a loss for something to blog – yet feeling I would like to – I have got distracted and overwhelmed by just how much there is out there. And I usually end up not posting after all. On two such occasions I searched Flickr for items ‘just to see’ if they might already be in there. Shows you how out of things I am. There they were, with a vengeance; search for cupcakes and start browsing some of the 178,565 images that come up. Or for coloured pencils and look through the 20,047 images that result. Scary yet reassuring stuff. So many people interested in and writing or photographing what might once have been thought of as obscure stuff. Andy Warhol would have loved it.