They Say the First Year is Always the Hardest…

Well, here it is.  Today marks the official One Year Anniversary of Rorschach Reviews.  365 days ago I started as a complete newcomer to the blogging world, with no contacts, no followers, and no idea what I was doing.  Since then, the site has grown from a glorified Myspace page to, well, a slightly better looking and more heavily trafficked Myspace page.  For those of you who haven’t been with me for very long, I thought I might give you a little rundown on what lead to me starting the site in the first place.

Last summer, I was all set to intern at a Seattle-based company who will remain nameless for the purposes of this post.  Then, literally the week before I was scheduled to start, the company informed me that they had decided to no longer hire any interns for the period in question.  I was frustrated, but with some very helpful encouraging from my girlfriend I decided to fill my new-found free time with something at least vaguely constructive.  One of those things happened to be a movie review blog, a suggestion which I suspect originated out of said girlfriend’s attempts to save herself from my film-related ramblings.

So, for the first few weeks, I went under the title “Rambling Man Reviews”, mostly for lack of a better title.  I ended up settling on Rorschach Reviews because of my personal focus on the subjective nature of movies.  Since then, I’ve spent about as many hours blogging as I have on studying for business school, a fact that shows just how nonsensical my list of priorities can be at times.  Luckily, that work hasn’t been for nothing, as in the past year my little blog has  gained nearly 200 followers on WordPress, 120 followers on Twitter (which I am still terrible at using), and as of today 250,000 views from 185 countries.  I’ve made a lot of great people from around the world over the past year, but here are a few I’d like to point out for specific contributions.

• Tyson Carter from Head in a Vice for becoming my site’s first follower
• Nick from Cinematic Katzenjammer for designing the kickass logo you see up above
• Fogs from Fogs’ Movie Reviews for my first advice on how to network with other bloggers
• Fernando from Committed to Celluloid for keeping my top commenter spot for four solid months now and counting (With Tim the Film Guy in a close second!)
• Every one of the 16 bloggers who have taken part in Blogger Interviews.

There are plenty of other people I’m grateful to, but I’m already starting to run low on finals studying time so I should probably wrap things up soon.  There are just two things I want to cover before I get back to work.

1.  In honor of my one year anniversary, I am changing my site’s tagline from “100% Movies, 10% Sassy Gay Friend” (which has nothing to do with anything) to the more fitting “What Do You See?”

2.  I’ve been having difficulty deciding what should come next for Rorschach Reviews, so I thought you, my readers, could help me by letting me know what you’d most like to see.  This could mean a new layout, new features, you name it.  If you have something you’d like to suggest feel free to put your two cents worth in down below in the comments, or shoot me an email at aswinn92@live.com.  In particular I’m always looking to increase my level of collaboration with other bloggers, so ideas in that vein would be especially welcome!

Once again, I want to give a big thank you to all of you, whether you know me through the blogging world or through the real one.  I hope you stick around to see what year two has in store for the site, and I will do my very best to make it worth your while.