Eleven.

I completely missed my eleventh “blogoversary”, which happened last week, on October 28th. It’s funny how, in the early days of blogging, the annual anniversary of our first post was a huge deal. The community was different back then; each of us bloggers had our own little community of readers within the larger community as a whole. People actually commented on blog posts and we found new blogs to read by checking out the sites belonging to our commenters. Facebook was fairly new back then and word of mouth was how we grew our sites.

The fact that I didn’t even think about my anniversary on the day it happened made me a little sad and filled with longing for the good old days. That said, better late than never. How about a walk down Memory Lane?

My site used to be called Suburban Scrawl and I started out on a Blogspot site. I played around with the limited color choices that were offered and one of my early color schemes was black and purple.

No, I don’t know what I was thinking either.

Later I got a little better at determining what would look good and came up with this header all on my own:

It was perfect for me at the time and I was very proud of it. Over the years I became more known for being a Chicago blogger/writer/author and wanted to reflect that online. I rebranded, using the Chicago city flag for inspiration:

And then, after a while I went back to the suburbs, creating a header that showcased pictures of Naperville, my home for twenty-two years:

Nowadays I’m just me, Melisa Wells. I don’t blog nearly as much as I did back in the day, but I’m not going anywhere. Whether you’ve been reading my work for eleven years, eleven days, or anything in between: thank you. I appreciate it more than you’ll ever know!