It was five years ago today, July 5, 2005, that the DenverInfill Blog made its debut.
A bit of history: I started working on the DenverInfill website in the spring of 2004. It took me a little over a year to complete all of the various downtown and center city district pages and the other major sections of the website. It was early July 2005 when I found myself with a finished website but with one of the ten menu tabs at the top still unused. Hmmm… what to do? Then it hit me: “What about a blog!” So on July 5, I named the final unused tab at the top the “DenverInfill Blog” and wrote my first post about rumors of a new condo tower called One Lincoln Park planned for somewhere along Lincoln Street. Back then I didn’t use any blogging software but wrote the posts on static webpages. You can access those original entries here. I did that for about a year before switching to the Blogger format on August 1, 2006. On December 20, 2009, the new (current) WordPress version of the DenverInfill Blog was launched, which was also the beginning of a new era for DenverInfill focusing on urbanism and not just infill.
The most popular DenverInfill Blog post? It’s not even close. On September 1, 2006, I wrote a silly piece called Guide to Suburban Denver Subdivision Names. That day I had about 500 visits to the blog, which was about average at the time. Then on October 9, over a month later, my post on subdivision names got picked up by Curbed LA and then the next day by Boing Boing and my site traffic went through the roof with more than 10,000 visits over a three-day period. Since then, Guide to Suburban Denver Subdivision Names has thrived in cyberspace and continues to be viewed about 600 times every month, almost four years later. Overall, DenverInfill is viewed about about 60,000 times a month on average.
The most commented on DenverInfill Blog post? That would also be the briefest DenverInfill Blog post ever, at just eight words in length. Sixty-three people had something to say about The Shortest Path.
Over the next five years, the DenverInfill Blog will continue to evolve, but our mission will remain the same:
- To inspire Denver citizens to envision and strive for exceptional urbanism in their city and region
- To inform and educate on topics relating to urban planning and city-building
- To serve as an online resource of notable urban projects, plans, policies, and programs throughout Denver
- To promote and showcase Denver and its opportunities to the world
- To advocate for positive changes to Denver’s existing and future built environment
To conclude, a big THANK YOU to all of you out there who visit this blog on a regular basis and for your kind words of support, and to the DenverInfill Blog contributors who are helping me expand the discussion about urbanism in Denver.
This is DenverInfill Blog post #884. Cheers!
