Phase Two

Forgive me if I dwell on an entirely arbitrary target for a while longer, but I'm uncharacteristically jubilant about reaching 100 posts. I'll explain to you why, hopefully without sounding completely self-important and egotistical in the process.

Eight months and ten days ago, inspired by a few sites I had seen, I changed this dormant website into an experimental weblog. I didn't have any idea how it would work out, what I would write about, or how long it would last. But I had only a little hope that I would see it through, so I would have been surprised had someone told me that in a matter of months, it would reach:

• 100 posts
• 150 user comments
• 13,000+ words

Which brings me to the point: I want to thank those friends who have become readers and contributors of trioptimum.co.uk. Although I write this rubbish mostly for myself, I might have given up on it by now if I hadn't felt an obligation to my friends to update it every few days.

You may be thinking that 100 posts isn't a massive amount of content for 8 months of work, and I agree with you completely... it's really not all that impressive. But 100 posts is a sort of a psychological milestone, a kind of proof that the experiment worked, that it's no longer an experiment, that I can maintain it, sustain it, and that I won't get bored and give up on it. I didn't know any of these things at the start, but I've known them for a while now, and reaching 100 entries feels in an entirely arbitrary way like the whole project has finally been justified.

And that leads me to something else - a pledge, I suppose - a promise, made as much to myself as to anyone else.

I wrote the first 100 entries in the space of a little over 8 months. The next 100, I'll write in four.

That's not even one entry a day, and I have no shortage of subjects - half of the stuff I've thought to write about in the past few months never even gets as far as the site. Unlike the novel, it's a reasonable target, and I think it's also a laudable goal.

Well, that's it, anyway. It seems to me that I didn't entirely avoid sounding self-important in this entry, which is unfortunate. But maybe I'll have figured out how to do that by the time I write entry #201. Stick around and find out.

We now return you to our regular scheduled randomness.