The first post in the MarsBlog archives originated on Blogger, and had to do with the discovery of evidence of flood volcanism on Mars involving a volume of water the size of Lake Erie. In reality, I was proto-blogging via hand-coded entries on the Louisiana Mars Society webpage for about six months before this — this particular entry only documents the switch to a true blog platform, but it’s the only anniversary date I can claim. MarsBlog (as LAMSAccess) existed on Blogger for about two months, until a hiccup at the Blogger site caused blogs to be randomly cross-published on different URLs for some reason, after which I very quickly moved it to Moveable Type, and then to WordPress about four years ago.

It’s really hard to believe that I’ve been doing this as long as I have. I had come across blogs as early as 1999, if I recall correctly, but really didn’t “get” them until I discovered Instapundit, Little Green Footballs, USS Clueless, and Transterrestrial Musings on or in the days after 9/11.

Now the funny part…

I’ve been helping teach classes in blogging and social media for People’s Press Collective for three years now, but only today actually applied some of those lessons myself. Until about two hours ago, I hadn’t logged into Twitter (as myself rather than PPC) for over two years, but I decided it was time to take my own advice and use Twitter as a news ticker for space-related items so as to break my long blogging dry spell. Not that I can guarantee that will increase my posting frequency, but it sure as heck can’t hurt.

It’s also a bit past the tenth anniversary of the genesis of what became In the Shadow of Ares. Carl and I came up with the idea to write some form of Mars-related young-adult fiction at the Mars Society conference at Stanford University about two weeks before 9/11, and then worked out the core of the book’s plot in late January, 2002. Interestingly, the prologue involving a spacecraft suffering (fatal, as it turned out) atmospheric entry problems was written in largely its final form on February 18, 2002 — just short of a year before the Columbia accident. Hopefully it won’t take quite as long to write the sequel, whose prologue and first act are now in detailed outline form, ready for writing.

And since I don’t have time for anything original today, I’ll link to a post from 2006 wherein I revisit the 1976 Bicentennial exhibitions at Kennedy Space Center…which I actually visited for real just a couple days before the Bicentennial day proper.