Birchtree is 16 years old today (and the nicest thing someone said to me this year)
Today marks 16 years since my first post on Birchtree. I was a scrappy 24-year-old who was stuck in a mindlessly uninteresting and low-paying job, but I loved technology. 16 years later, I don’t exactly know why I pulled the trigger on creating this blog, but I definitely know I’d been following people such as John Gruber, Sean Blanc, Christina Warren, Ben Brooks, Leo Laporte, Serenity Caldwell, and the like. I wanted to do what they did. They were Apple/tech bloggers, this cool club I wanted to be a part of.
On top of that, the iPhone was just a couple of years old, so we were in an exciting new era of tech. Despite the fact that I buy almost every new thing Apple sells these days (even $2,000 phones with a two-month wait time), I didn’t even own an iPhone yet. At the time I had the Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant, which, yes, is the first in Samsung’s current line of flagships. It had Avatar preinstalled, so I’ve been watching movies as James Cameron intended for quite a while. Just saying.
I was optimistic and excited about tech, and I wanted to share my opinions. If I’m being honest, for the first couple of years, I basically just copied the style of the people who inspired me to get into this. Hell, to this day, I still do Gruber-style link posts for a lot of the stuff I publish.
As anyone who knows me is aware, I have more than a couple of projects going at any one time, but over these 16 years, Birchtree is the one constant that has never gone away. I pushed hard for several years, trying to gain traction. This was back when Twitter was the old Twitter we all miss, and I would try to get into the fray and (probably annoyingly) tag people I looked up to, hoping they’d read what I wrote. But I was constantly writing – I was trying to write sensationalist headlines and share hot takes that would go viral, and for a long time, it just didn’t work. I was getting single-digit hits to my blog every day. Some days, I’d hit double digits, and then have to remind myself that I was five of those visits. Oof.
I write some variety of an anniversary post every year, so I don’t want to go over the whole history of the blog yet again, but needless to say, I eventually did get some traction. Those people I looked up to, who’d been doing it longer than me and were getting invited to Apple events and those sorts of things, started following me as well. It was really special to learn that. And I don’t know how high up the chain it goes, but I do have very good information from multiple sources that a decent number of Apple employees follow the blog too.
I feel like it was once these folks I looked up to followed me and cared about what I wrote, even if they didn’t always agree with it, that I finally started to relax. I still want to write well. I still want to write things that elicit a reaction in people. And of course, I still want to be extremely honest with everything I put on this blog. I want to improve my craft so that I'm constantly looking back on things I wrote years ago and cringing because I would do it so much better now.
I’ll close with something someone said to me a few months ago that is probably the thing that touched me the most this year. I was talking to someone who will not be named, and we were talking about Birchtree. I mentioned that I’d been inspired by the names listed above, and said that I don’t think I’ve ever reached that level. They were surprised that I felt that way. They said something to the effect of, “I don't know why you don't feel that way, I think you're clearly on most people's short list of Apple bloggers.” That really got me.
Today, Birchtree turns 16. It can drive. As I say every year, I know this blog will end at some point, but I just don’t see when I'm going to stop wanting to do this. Will I make it to 20 years? Easy. 30 years? Probably. 40 years? If the robots haven't killed us all, hopefully.
At 16, I also know I'm one of the old guard at this point, but it's encouraging to know that I'm still probably not even halfway through the journey.
