Holy crap.

(Well, actually Pylorns typed “holy fuck!” when he saw the final score.)

I’ve been a Saints fan since childhood. I’ve seen the losing years, the paper bags, the “so close” years and the tragedy of four years ago. I saw the rebirth, the concerted effort and the true turnaround.

Now, I’ve seen the result of the hard work, the dedication and the renewed promise to their home city that they would put the effort in for the Crescent City.

For Bobby Hebert, Archie Manning, Rickey Jackson, Buddy DeLaberteau (Requiescat en pace, sir), Deuce McAllister and the legends of the game that have come through the city at the end of the Mighty Mississippi River, you can look upon the New Orleans Saints with pride and respect once more.

Well done, boys. Well done.

Out.

Wetwired is not a finalist in the 2008 Blog Awards. Which means… we’ll have to work double hard in 2009 to improve the site.   Part of that I think will come with getting some help on the coding side to make sure that the site actually does work on every browser correctly.

In retrospect I think I need to go back to the drawing board on the site and come up with something truly unique and graphically pleasing. But As I have discussed with others, what good is a great design if you don’t have great content so we’ll also have to double our efforts in the content side of Wetwired.   The design of the site has been with a central theme for the past couple of years and we all agree that the theme is pretty unique.   I think its most likely usability.

2008 Wetwired in Review

This year has been an interesting year.  Considering the previous year was a do-nothing year.  Meaning we really didn’t do a damn thing.  I didn’t update the site, we hardly posted, we kind of took the year off.  2008 on the other hand had major changes.

We switched from Movable Type to Wordpress.

We switched hosts to go-daddy (saving a ton of money at the sacrifice of speed).

We contracted a new artist to re-do the artwork that had previously got us into the finals of best blog design of 2005.

We finalized the new design(mostly).  Aside from the footer part taking until November to get complete…

We started, for the fist time in the 8 year history of Wetwired, to put up advertisements.  Google Adsense, and a few products that we’ve tested ourselves.  While stylistically it goes against everything  I hate; it made sense.  Believe it or not Wetwired is just about paying for itself (cost of domain and monthly hosting).   That in itself is something I really didn’t expect.

Wetwired has seen the most traffic it has ever seen this year.  And we’ve doubled our daily traffic from last year.

We have had a semi-regular podcast for the first time ever and it has been fairly successful.  Including being on itunes.

We’ve had the re-appearance of Beerslinger from his 2 year hiatus.  And we’ve had a couple new writers come on board (prax and larkynm) who unfortunately post infrequently, but are a welcome addition none the less.

We have been interviewed by the Daily Texan (UT paper) and we recorded the interview and offered it up as a podcast.

And lastly I think I’ve updated wordpress versions 6 times this year with some major changes on the back end.  It’s been a pretty good year for them as they (wordpress) have added some great functionality and some great user options in an overhaul of the administration side.

Wetwired in 2009

I think 2009 will be a continued rebuilding year as we look for more local Austin writers who are interested in contributing (for free).   When I look at the amount of money pumped into the site it will be a while before we regain it through advertisement etc but I do see the site fully paying for itself, the operating costs so to speak, and I think we can look forward to having some surprises for our few loyal readers with anything we have left over.

When it comes to traffic, we’ll be working hard to continue to optimize wetwired and post more original content and/or commentary that is of interest and that continues to add readership.  I suspect that if we actually get on the ball this year we could potentially finally break out of the small blog arena.  You would think that after 8 years of being a website/blog that we’d have more traffic.. but Finley, Beerslinger and I all atribute the slowness to 3 potential things.  1. Laziness.  2. Alcohol.  3. Waking up in the morning in the front yard and realizing that those are not our flamingos…

Lastly, Austin has a booming local blogging scene.  With freaking monthly meet-ups!  I’ve personally been in Austin since late 2000 and never been to one, yet we’ve been posting here for quite some time.  I have met (albeit briefly) one other local austin blogger.  She was doing an imprav with Cold-Towne Theatre.   So at some point I suspect that we’ll come out of our holes and make an appearance at one of the local Austin meetings.

As the 2009 looks fairly bleak when it comes to the economy, I think Wetwired will do just fine.

Postscript

If you are interested in contributing articles to wetwired or interested in just getting involved in a project let us know by commenting.  We’ll be on the lookout for new talent, and/or we wouldn’t mind showing someone the administration side if you just want to learn.