Oh, the Fun of YEAR ONE

Well… WE MADE IT!!! One full year of blogging. Last February, I set out to cross an item off of my bucket list… start and maintain a blog for a year. And last week marked the one year “blogiversary” (as it is lovingly referred to in blog world) of Oh, the Fun. It’s been quite the journey and I’ve learned a lot. To celebrate the excitement of making it a year, successfully completing a bucket list task, etc. we’ve got a few fun posts lined up for this week. 🙂 Buckle up for the party… this week you can expect to see:

• Some fun facts about Oh, the Fun and how it’s changed throughout the year (today)
• Superlatives! (most popular post, hardest to write, favorite adventure, etc.)
• Our Winter House Tour! (yep, that means a video)
• The answer to the BIG QUESTION… will Oh, the Fun press on or this the end to a really fun era? (See more about this question here.)

So let’s get started!

Just over a year ago, I published my first post on this blog. I didn’t know what I was doing, I had no knowledge of WordPress, and I thought people were joking when they used the word “widget”. The first post was entitled “We Call It: Sink or Swim” because that was quite literally how I felt. I jumped right in and it was either learn on the fly or drown in an ocean of coding, plugins, and post drafts.

BUT, we made it. Slowly and bit by bit I learned how to do new things, watched countless YouTube tutorials, and published a few first posts. These days, these things come easier and I have enjoyed transitioning from “I think this is going to kill me” to “I think I’ve got (at least some of) this down!”. It’s funny to think about where we started- not only what our house looked like then compared to now, but also what the blog looked like then compared to now…

Throughout the year, the look (and even name!) of the blog went through some changes. I’m glad I took some screen shots along the way because it’s fun to look back and see the steps it went through to become what it is today. When the blog first started, we were sporting a background in a favorite color of mine AND our original name: Oh, the Fun of It.

We started on a WordPress.com site and the address was long and hard to type: http://ohthefunofit.wordpress.com. Quite the mouthful, huh? Eventually, the name got shortened to something easier to say and type: Oh, the Fun. We also moved to a self-hosted WP.org site and got a brand new domain and address! And thus, ohthefun.com was “born”. 🙂 In addition to the name change, the blog got a make over!

The inspiration for the new color scheme (turquoise, teals, greens, and coral) came from the bedding in our spare bedroom and we actually used those pictures as the background for the new header and eventually, the new logo.

Fast forward a bit more… I was craving something a little less busy, more clean lined, and easier to focus on. We nixed the header all together (hah, rhyming!) and created a title that was a little simpler and a little cleaner. The busy gray medallion background (you can see it if you scroll up a bit) was replaced with a lighter geometric print. Those fun colors stayed, though, and we brought in the corals, teals, etc. in the font, menu bar, and buttons.

The blog lived like this for awhile until it’s most recent change-up… an even simpler and more subtle background and the addition of a few advertisements to help us rake in a little bit of money to help keep things going.

I love how the blog looks today. It took awhile to get here (and there have been a few changes even since that last picture was snapped!), but I think that is all part of the process. In retrospect, the transformation of the blog is a lot like the changes we go through as we grow up and even more like the changes our home has gone through over the past year. When we first bought the house, I wanted everything to be finished and decorated right away. It took me a long time to realize that the better I get to know myself, the better Mitch and I get to know each other and the better we get to know our home, the more our style will evolve. And this takes time.

This doesn’t just go for decorating tastes. I think that the longer we spend growing as people, the more we get to know ourselves, our tastes, our beliefs, our ticks, our perspectives… our style. The home that Mitch and I have now is drastically different from the home we had a year ago- and in a lot of ways besides how it looks! But it’s funny to me that the look, feel, and style of the blog evolved just as our home evolved, just as I as a person evolved. What a neat thing to look back on.

A year of blogging looks like a lot of different things- posts, photos, comments, you name it. Sometimes it’s hard to think about all of the things that happen over the course of a year. I thought it would be fun to put some of the nuts and bolts into something a little more entertaining to read… Enjoy the recap of YEAR ONE!

*Apparently, the infographic is not displaying correctly on cell phones… try looking at it on a computer for best results and we’ll see if we can solve the puzzle…

Three cheers for the One Year Blogiversary kickoff! This is where I leave you, my friends… that is until tomorrow when we dive into some of the best and worst moments of the year-long history of this little blog. 🙂 See ya then.