It’s all the rage in the blogosphere to celebrate Blogiversaries. What IS a blogiversary? It’s the anniversary of your blog, of course!

Today is my 5th year blogging here at justagirlintheworld.com. Five years - how old does that make me in blog years?

To celebrate - I’m giving away 5 autographed copies of my soon-to-be-released book, WordPress For Dummies. One book for every year I’ve been blogging here. More about that later, though.

Actually, I’ve been blogging on this domain much longer than that (more like 8 years), but my archives only go back to October 28, 2002. Why? Back then I was using Movable Type with a Berkeley database setup. Berkeley - no, really! I didn’t know, back then, that when you go over your space allotment on your hosting account - - a Berkeley database eats itself.. becomes corrupt and there is no restoring it. My host, at the time, didn’t know a THING about MT and told me that the database could not be restored.. and, of course, I didn’t have a backup (duh!)… so about three years of archives were lost to the wind.

Of course, we’re talking sometime around 1998 - 1999-ish - I was building static HTML web pages (before it was called ‘blogging’, I guess) and then copied all of those static HTML pages into MT, once it first came out, and started blogging away - this was back when MT was free and WordPress wasn’t yet a gleam in Matt Mullenweg’s eye. (Well, maybe it was - I just didn’t know it).

I cut my blog designing teeth on Movable Type - creating MT templates and rebuilding…and rebuilding…and rebuilding. WordPress came along and changed things for the BETTER.

So, with the archives I was able to restore… this blog starts with a post I did about Purple Mums and a patient I took care of back then. In the last 5 years of this blog I’ve:

• Supported George W. Bush in his bid for the Presidency of the United States. I even happily blogged his victory - these days? I cringe when I read those blog posts of mine. Politically speaking, I ripped my RNC membership card up quite some time ago. I even put it in a pre-paid postage envelope and mailed my ripped up card back to the RNC in my little passive-aggressive way of telling them to bite me.
• Turned my children into proud goats
• I said goodbye to Grandma C and dealt with it the only way I knew how.
• I worked many of my early blogging years as a Registered Nurse in Home Hospice - providing care for the terminally ill and helping those patients families say goodbye to their loved one. I dealt with some pretty hefty issues back then: assisted suicide, struggled with that line of separation that helped me deal, doctors who don’t listen, brain harvesting, grumpy old men and burnout
• In 2003, Chris moved from California to Wisconsin to live with little ol’ me. We had been dating since January 2001 - he lived in Cali, me in Wisconsin - - by 2003, I guess we decided we were tired of all that long distance relationship stuff (aside from the fact that the airfare was getting more and more expensive. It would be 2 more years before he asks me to marry him, and another year before we actually did!
• In 2003, I took up downhill skiing - learned to ski in Lake Tahoe and have been an avid skier ever since! All the way up to this year when the whole family went on a ski trip to Gore Mountain. Looking forward to our first snow this year, too!
• Broke down and cried like an idiot the first time I visited Ground Zero
• In 2004, I quit my full-time nursing job to pursue full time self-employment for my own business at E.Webscapes and Blogs About Hosting. Originally, I had planned on working 10-15 hours a week part-time for Chris’s company to supplement my income from the design and hosting business. That never panned out, though.. because once I quit my full-time job, my own companies took off so well, I had no time to work for him! I’ve since hired on some great designers to help me with the flow of orders, and one really kick ass assistant who helps keep me organized (and helps me keep my sanity!): Becca, Leanne, Joni, Dino and Lindsey joined me at E.Webscapes over the years and I couldn’t ask for a better team, or a greater bunch of people to know
• I totally should have purchased Google stock when they offered up their first public IPO. Hindsight. . .
• In 2005, we bought a lake home in Alabama. And it didn’t take too long for me to realize some of the cultural differences down there. Heh.
• In September 2005, Chris and I went on a cruise with several friends. We visited St. Marteens, St.Thomas and the Princess Cays. Chris proposed to me on that cruise - of course, I accepted!
• I spoke at the SXSW Interactive Conference in May 2006 on the How to Make $$ with your blog design skills panel.
• I abandoned my blog on June 16th, 2006 for three weeks. Why? So I could travel to New York and get married! We got married in a beautiful outdoor ceremony at his mothers house in Putnam Valley, New York. We then flew to Bonaire (only after spending 7 hours in Aruba) for our honeymoon where I took up scuba diving for the very first time, and got some great underwater photos!
• In December 2006 I posted the news that I had been asked to write WordPress For Dummies. In September 2007, I finally finished it - and currently am awaiting it’s release in October 2007. What a year! My family and friends will define 2007 as “The Year of The Book” - because it did kind of take over my life over the past year. But worth it… fun, interesting and a tremendous learning experience!

The past 5 years have been quite a ride. Today, I’m grateful for quite a lot of things in my life. I have the usual speed bumps in life, as to be expected, but, overall - I’m pretty happy and satisfied. Chris and I are going on 2 happy years of marriage. My kids are healthy and working towards making their way in life as they very quickly zoom through those late teenage years into adulthood. Over the past year, I’ve re-connected with my friend Tom, who has been a very special and good friend to me over the past decade (who makes sure I’m never low on the espresso supplies.) My friendship with Leanne has grown over the past 3 years - since we first met online in 2004. We’ve since met several times, face-to-face, and I’m proud and happy to call her my friend (I *think* maybe I’ve made it into her ‘long-term’ classification… though, I haven’t checked with her recently).

I guess I’ve kind of chronicled bits and pieces of my daily life on this blog for the past 5 years - it was kind of fun to go back through the archives and read stuff I posted 5 years ago and reminisce a little. If you haven’t done it recently on your own blog - I highly recommend it.

Now - about that book give-a-way!

When I look over the past 5 years of my blog, I used WordPress to power this blog for 4 of those 5 years. I migrated off Movable Type to WordPress 1.0.2 and have never looked back. Since then, through countless upgrades and an unreal amount of plugins and themes - the development of hundreds of client blogs using WordPress.. all the way up to present day, having written the official Dummies book on the topic of WordPress - - I can safely say that WordPress has really defined my blogging life here on this domain, and others. Could I have done it without WordPress? Of course (well, except for the book part) - but would it have been as much fun, as much pain and as exciting without it? Very doubtful.

Here’s the deal.

Make a post on your blog about how WordPress has helped, or harmed, you with your blog. Include plugins you use, themes you use, stuff you’ve learned, opportunities you’ve taken.. people you’ve met.

Doesn’t matter if your blog is 5 years old or 5 days old - everyone has WordPress War Stories, don’t they? Aren’t using WordPress… yet? Maybe you want to? Post your reasons why you’d want to migrate off of whatever you ARE using to the WordPress platform.

Bring it on - the good, the bad and the ugly. The more fun and interesting… the better!

Link to this post via a trackback between now and November 5th - and in the end, I’m choosing 5 random links from blogs and will contact the blog owner for your information on where to send your free, autographed copy of WordPress For Dummies.

Just my way of rounding off and celebrating my 5 years of blogging with WordPress (well, except for that first year…but who’s counting?)

5 years - 5 free books.

But what if 5 blogs don’t link to this post? I guess it will be time to wallpaper my office with pages from WordPress For Dummies, then, hey? Ha!

So, yea - - can I keep blogging for another five years? I guess only time will tell - - maybe blogging won’t be blogging by then. Maybe it will be something else, entirely. I’m excited and interested enough to stick around and find out!