On June 2, 2015 I posted a piece on the 1995 R5-D4 figure and history was made. Post number one on SRM set the tone perfectly. There are a lot of nostalgia sites on the web but this site was mine. Rather than being content to reply to other people’s memories it was time I forged a small space on the inter webs to chronicle my own memories about things most people quit caring about 20 years ago. My first post touched on several categories that I planned to return to: Star Wars, toys, 90’s nostalgia, and bad humor.
I hadn’t worked on a website since college and even then I quickly lost interest in my bad looking websites built with bad HTML and hosted on free servers that pelted my 3 viewers a month with pop up after pop up. On top of that, those websites typically had a narrow focus that was difficult to continue to create meaningful content for. With this site I wanted to actually commit to continued updates and as a result I was forced to broaden my scope. At best I might find a few other people that enjoyed what I had to write and could relate to my experiences. At worst I’d lose a year of web hosting fees and get the creative urge out of my system.
Now just over a year later this site has reached post number 100. Although not an immense amount of entries 100 unique posts is handily more than I’ve ever reached with any of my previous websites and if I don’t say so myself, the postings are much more entertaining. At least they are to me. At minimum I would at least call them “readable”.
I will say in all honesty I was hoping for more hits and comments a year in. So far in 100 posts I have yet to spur any kind of conversation among readers and overall views aren’t quite what I had hoped for. That said, views are trending upwards with steady increases over the last year so it seems like whatever is being posted here at least has some people interested in returning for more.
Another tidbit I found intriguing is which topics seem to strike a chord with readers. After 100 posts I would have expected that my most popular entry would be something mainstream like a Star Wars post or maybe a video game review. Surprisingly people really seem to have responded to this piece on 90’s Super Soakers which has garnered more combined views and emails than any other topic thus far. Cool.
So what’s in store for SuperRetroMania? Now that I’ve at least cemented a web presence I do plan to expand the footprint of this site and hopefully attract more readers as a result. How I plan to do that I will keep under wraps for now but I will let you know that I do have a few irons in the fire. When I first began writing a friend of mine asked me “do you think you’ll have enough topics to talk about?” Fortunately I can say that the well is far from dry as there are many items that I have yet to discuss that I’d like to pick up on. One subject specifically are Nintendo Power magazines. I have all of the first 50 issues, and most of the first 100 and yet I’ve only managed a single write up on Nintendo Power #1 (July/August, 1988) so there is plenty of milage remaining there alone. Not to mention that next year will be the 40th anniversary of Star Wars, the 20th anniversary of the 1997 Special Editions, and heavens knows what other crap I’ll come up with.
I wanted to wrap this up by thanking you the readers for checking this site out and giving it a chance. I want to thank my subscribers for enjoying the content enough to click the subscribe button, and I’d like to thank everyone that’s ever found any of my writings worthy enough to click that like button. Although it may not seem like much, I can honestly say that there is an indescribable satisfaction that comes with knowing that someone else on this planet actually enjoys something you’ve created. Lastly, I’d like to thank my buddy and fellow contributor tps1983 for helping me reach post #100 and putting his on spin on the site. Here’s to the next 100!
Super RetroMania 