Ten years ago my body looked like that.
And ten years ago I started www.ALANILAGAN.com.
Obviously, a lot has changed for both.
This month marks the tenth anniversary of this website. Back in January of 2003, we first opened the portal into my unruly patch of the internet – two months prior to its scheduled opening (thank you, Pat Troy) – and since then I’ve never looked back. At the time, it was nothing like it is today. There was no daily blog, there was but a scant collection of Photographs, and my Projects were in-flux and too ponderous to properly post in full. All I wanted back then was a repository for some of my work, a place to which I could point whenever someone asked me what I did and ‘Keyboard Specialist 1’ failed to encompass it properly.
Ten years later, an eternity for a personal website, I am taking a moment to give myself, and those who have helped out so graciously throughout the years, a little pat on the back. Look at The Projects. Check out The Pictures. Read The Writings. We’ve come a long way. I now post an average of three posts a day, occasionally less, and often more (catch us on a day like Super Bowl Sunday and you’re likely to see multiple posts on cocktails, jockstraps, Madonna, shirtless football players, and guys in their underwear – all in honor of America’s favorite game.) That goes seven days a week, 365 days a year. You know those other sites that take weekends and vacations off? I don’t. When I’m out of town, I have posts programmed. When I go out to a party on Friday night, knowing it will be a rough Saturday, I make sure to have something set up before I sip my first cocktail. It takes a lot of work to make it look easy. Why do I bother? Because I know what it’s like to visit your favorite website and not have an update in days, weeks, months, and I would never want to do that to someone who is good enough to stop by and give me a moment of their time.
I don’t get paid for this. I’ve never received one dollar for doing what I do here, and I never bothered to seriously look into that because it’s always been a labor of love, a creative outlet worth ten times the amount in therapy. There may come a time when ads start popping up (and if any advertiser wants in and can figure out how to get it all set up, shoot me a message) but even that won’t change the commitment and promise I’ve made to you. You’ve seen me through some of the most difficult, and some of the most happy, moments of my life. In ways, you’ve seen me through more things than my closest friends and family have, simply by being here more than any of them have, and that’s a strange and wonderful thing.
I’d like to thank the ongoing cast of characters that wanders in and among my online world here, including my  husband Andy, my parents, my brother, my niece and nephew, and the friends who have become like family – Suzie, Chris, JoAnn, Kira – as well as the webmasters who have kept this site going when I thought HTML stood for something, well, decidedly different than what it does – Pat Troy, who started it all, and Skip Montross, who made it into what it now is. I couldn’t have done any of this without all those people, and more. You would be part of that more – yes, you, who are reading this now and wondering if I mean you – I do. It always falls short when all I can muster is a ‘Thank you’, but it’s a heartfelt one, because as much as I want to believe I could do this alone, I couldn’t. Nor would I ever want to – this journey we’re on is meant to be shared.
With that, I invite you to relax, pull up a chair and a favorite cocktail, and settle in for another year of www.ALANILAGAN.com.
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