Rumble: The Road.... One Year Later...

The Road to the Horizon is one year old (eh.. young). Hurray, Hurray...! A retrospect:

Early January 2007, we had a week holiday in Vienna. During that time off, I was playing with the idea of (at last!) publishing some of my short stories and an Dutch book I wrote back in 1994-1995 on the Internet.

I never published anything on the web before. I had a go with Dreamweaver on a test page. Found it too complicated to be flexible. Tried something on live.com but that did not give me the features I wanted.

Mid Jan 2007, I ended up on "Blogger". The first blog went online with the Dutch Ebook about my three expeditions to Antarctica and the Pacific. In one year Verslaafd aan de Horizon ("Addicted to the Horizon") got over 6,000 visitors.

At the same time, I started "The Road to the Horizon". Originally meant as a web-platform to publish several articles and short stories I wrote for magazines, or had sent to friends... Little did I know that a year later -now- I would end up with over 90,000 visitors, from 181 countries. Average that per day and include the daily 120 updated via RSS and automated Email, we come to 400 visitors per day. Sometimes I gaze at the Clustermap below, with the red dots representing the visitors. And I wonder what did I start? Ha!

.
Over the year, loads of things changed on The Road, but the core remained the same: all about aid work, travelling, adventure, and the world around us, in a mixture of short stories, news bulletins and rumbles...

In February I started another Dutch blog, intended as a Dutch translation from "The Road". And it still is, though the frequency of posting is far lower than the English version. It is still a mystery to me why this site has over 50,000 hits in a year...

In April, tired of having to read many different news sources, I started two automated humanitarian news aggregators: The Other World News (1,000 hits/year) and its Dutch brother Nieuws uit de Andere Wereld (1,300 hits/year).

Last but not least. Because I wanted a more flexible way to collect newspaper clippings, The Road Daily, and an aidworkers collective International Aid Workers Today" were born in December 2007.

So here we are today!