Happy One Year, Four Months

September 4th was the one year anniversary of this blog, but I’ve been too busy (!) to stop and ponder the significance of it until tonight. While I’ve had many blogs before, EmilyChang.com is the first professional blog that I’ve started that’s purely focused on web, design and technology, and it’s been an extremely gratifying experience. I’ve met hundreds of people, many of whom I used to merely read from a far, become friends with those that I only once admired, been fortunate to have a stellar line-up of clients at Ideacodes that share my core philosophies, and had that satisfaction of turning an idea into a reality.

“In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media.” – Paul Graham

eHub began as a list on September 12, 2005 to keep track of the explosion of web applications that I seeing and using. I didn’t spend much time planning eHub, but installed a new blog, modified Max‘s blog design to suit eHub’s needs, customized the database, and added the thirty or so apps that I was tracking. Since then, it’s become a steady stream of resources for those addicted to web services with over 1400 resources, including over 80 eHub interviews with the creators of web applications and the founders behind hundreds of startups. The interviews have enjoyed international readership and success as a channel at eHub @ CNET Japan, where editors translate interviews as they’re posted. I still post to eHub daily except on weekends and still signup for and try every app that’s listed. I plan to add more social and community features to eHub in the next few months, as well as several other projects related to eHub, so stay tuned!

My written blog posts have inevitably slowed a bit due to our company‘s growth, but this year I’m (working on) building writing time into my daily schedule so expect more posts. It still amazes me that my few thoughts have reached so many of you. Thanks to my readers, commentors, and those that have written to me personally with your stories and thoughts. At some point in the last couple of months, the number of RSS subscribers for my blog overtook the number of subscribers to eHub. Between the two trackable feeds, my entire site receives around 16,000 daily RSS readers.

I wish I had an app to track the timeline of events that have occurred over the last year. Between offline documentation (notebooks, sketchbooks, moleskins, bits of paper) and online (text files, to do lists, calendars, photos, video, basecamp, too many other web apps to name) it’s hard to keep track of the amazing chronology of events that have transpired. I need a mashup of these sources to get a holistic sense of what’s happened. If anyone knows of an app that will pull all the data from my Mac hard drive and from my online social networks and display it on my 30″ cinema display with Wii as the controller, let me know :) In the meantime, I look forward to seeing, sharing, and discussing the innovations coming in this new year!