theITbaby turns one today
March 25th 2013, after a few days playing with a Bitnami distro I built under a VMWare virtual machine I decide to go ahead and launch theITbaby in advance of my baby’s launch date. She was expected to be popping out in the next week, so I had some nervous energy on my hands and was filling it with baby related stuff.
The first published piece was just a format test, the second was a pretty meh review as I was busy with the backend, and then it went on from there. Some might say it went downhill from there, who knows. Kim and I both wrote for the site for a while but I’ve been doing daddy blogging exclusively for the past seven months.
The real baby decided to be a little later than expected but came into this world fine, life went on, me and ITMama learned baby wrangling, and a year later and 330+ published pieces theITbaby still runs in a virtual window on a machine that’s mostly dedicated to writing and using the Foscam viewer page for baby audio.
It’s been an interesting trip. I’m used to tech blogging for my other gig, and that industry. I didn’t know that baby blogs were bought and sold by big baby nearly as much as they are, didn’t realize that many places want to write the review for you, it’s kind of interesting as I’d never run into total shillery before.
On a side note, if anyone wants to bribe me to write a crappy review, let me know, will sell out for college fund… or not.
During the year we built up a small following of people who were not related or friends, a large following of people trying to figure out what the hell I was doing, and a few disgruntled people I pointed out were selling fake products designed to prey on exhausted parents.
We also had a small contingent of people coming in to tell me that everything I wrote was wrong, although when asked to disprove any of it nothing happened… so yeah… suck it.
I guess the biggest question for the site was has it been worth it? And that’s a yes. Barely. Our theITbaby millions covered electricity, domain registration, and a couple of bags of snacks at the moment.
Without big baby connections or years worth of clout or hundreds of thousands of visitors a week it’s hard to get traction. We’ve been discovered by some companies that really were looking for a tech-oriented baby blog, but unfortunately my testing unit (Maggie,) isn’t quite within the age range for anything we’ve been sent so there are some lackluster reviews of what an adult thinks of the product.
The site didn’t go where I was expecting it to, but it also didn’t perform badly.
Anyway, that’ it for the self-congratulatory BS for the site surviving a year, just thought I’d write it well in advance and set it to post on the actual site live on the birthdate.
