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Yes, The Beat is two years old today as its own standalone website. Woot. And we’re celebrating just as we always do—slaving away into the wee hours of the day so you have something to read with your coffee.

Oh yeah, we also changed the background just for the day—yes, it’s awful, but it’s our blog and we’ll be tacky if we want to.

What has the past year brought behind the scenes? After webhosting travails, we’ve mostly settled down. A brief experiment into something called Cloudflare led to constant site outages and spam attacks. Installing Bad Behavior (and ditching Cloudflare) mostly solved that.

In fact, running The Beat was very stable over the last 12 months…TOO stable! Nothing on the internet lasts that long. “Blogging” is way harder than it used to be—some say it’s passé. For some reason, I like running a website more than posting Facebook status updates, however, so I’ll stick around for a while yet.

One thing that has improved vastly over the year has been content from our fine contributors. Todd Allen has been kicking it for the last couple of months. Tireless Torsten Adair has been posting his weekend previews and essays—you did read his heartbreaking piece on Gary Friedrich, didn’t you?—and Bruce Lidl, Jen Vaughn and, of course, the Sales Chart team of Paul, Marc-Oliver and Paul, have been doing yeoman work. They’re all awesome—please buy them a drink when you get a chance, okay? A presence behind the scenes is Synsidar who copyedits some of my more egregious typos. (I know it’s hard to believe this blog has a copy editor sometimes, but his schedule doesn’t allow him to do it before posting, alas.)

Of course, we couldn’t do it—REALLY—without our great sponsors: CCI, ReedPop, Sailor Twain, Threadless, Comicraft, Top Shelf and all the rest.

So what’s coming up? A redesign is gently bubbling under the surface. More contributors. More interviews. More Vietnamese coffee. In July it will be my ten-YEAR anniversary of running a daily website. We’ll have something special planned for that…maybe a vacation.

Biggest thanks of all go to you, the Beat Elite Reading Squad. Every night before I go to bed I check Sitemeter and, against all logic, people actually came and read this blog. It still blows me away. And it is much appreciated.

As far as the future goes, what do YOU want, gentle readers? Let us know in the comments. We’ll be here, as always.

1 COMMENT

  4. Happy Beat-day!

    I didn’t bake a cake, so Google [superhero cake] for possibilities!

    (Me, I’m thinking cupcakes, and each cupcake has a different superhero logo on top, with matching icing.)

  7. Happy blogiversary, Heidi! Frankly I love the pink cakey background, it’s very you. I also tend to prefer blogging to Facebook updating, and was not aware this is now a sign of being an old fart. In terms of the future, I appreciate all the insightful news stories, and particularly your longish essays, do keep them up!

  15. Happy Birthday THE BEAT! I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’re the first and only site I go to when I want to know what’s going on in the wonderful world of comics.

  19. What do you mean you’ve changed the background? Hasn’t it been yellow for weeks? I like the yellow a lot. Keep it forever.

  23. Happy Birthday, Heidi–virtually every day for the last two years, the Beat has been my morning coffee. Thanks for all your work, and keep it up!

  29. Happy Blog Creation Anniversary!

    “As far as the future goes, what do YOU want, gentle readers?”

    Less coverage of Time Warner/Disney superheroes, more everything else. :D

  30. “A brief experiment into something called Cloudflare led to constant site outages and spam attacks.”

    Sorry you had a bad experience with CloudFlare. I took a look at the only ticket I could see, and it looks like you had a traffic surge that was causing issues with your server (while we can most certainly help with spikes, it doesn’t do much good if your back end server goes down and/or is having issues).

    Spam: There’s nothing that we would do to lead to a spam attack at all.

    Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.