This blog’s 10th anniversary week: how it started

I’m celebrating this blog’s 10th anniversary this week.  I started it on May 29, 2007.

I thought this would be a good time to look back on how I got into all this.

When Food Politics first came out in 2002, I started a Website—not a blog—called foodpolitics.com.   It had information about the book and a few other things but it was hard to use and I mostly ignored it.

Then in 2006, Farrar Strauss & Giroux (FSG) published my book What to Eat.  While FSG was getting ready to issue the paperback, its marketing people asked if I would be willing to be a social media guinea pig.  They were interested in using the Web to connect with customers.  They asked me to start a blog to help publicize the book.

I was dubious.  For one thing, I am electronically challenged.  For another, I was really worried about the amount of time something like this might eat up.

But FSG offered to pay for building the Website, and asked only that I try it for a few months.  That seemed like too generous a deal to pass up, so I said OK.

The Web designers—Cre8d in Auckland, New Zealand of all places—finished the site in April 2007.

Foodpolitics.com was already taken as a domain name, and so was whattoeat.com.  That left us with the awkward domain name: whattoeatbook.com.  But I thought it looked great.  Here’s a June 2007 screen capture from the Web archive.

I did some beta-testing that April, mostly posting excerpts from What to Eat, and launched the site officially with the post I reproduced yesterday.  

For a year and half, from May 29, 2007 through January 20, 2009 I posted more or less regularly on whattoeatbook.com.

But by then I had another book in the works (Pet Food Politics) and could barely keep up with one website, let alone two.

In January 2009, the Cre8d folks, Rachel Cunliffe and Stephen Merriman, moved the domain name, foodpolitics.com, into WordPress, and merged the content of the former foodpolitics.com site with everything that was now on whattoeatbook.com onto the new foodpolitics.com site.

I’ve used foodpolitics.com ever since.  This is post #3188.

Tomorrow: why I’ve stuck with this so long.