I’m so happy to be able to celebrate GeekDad’s 2nd anniversary today, because GeekDad has truly changed my life. I discovered GeekDad a few weeks after Chris had started it. I had a bunch of similar geeky sites on my RSS list, but this one was really up my alley: I’m a dad, I’m a real geek (I was running a play-by-email Star Trek RPG at the time), and I’ve always loved writing.
Then came the day that Chris put out a call for new writers. It honestly seemed like something that would be out of my reach, but I also knew that if I didn’t try, I’d always wonder. So I submitted my rather meager (to my mind) credentials, and waited. And I got the call (or email, as it were).
So I dove in, and started writing my heart out. I loved the subject matter, and just put out post after post, trying to do as much as I could before someone figured out I didn’t belong. I even posed the idea of starting a podcast, which Chris thought was a good idea. He asked me to record a sample, so I put the call out to the other writers to join in (it’s always better to have people to talk to), and a few of them answered: Brian, Dan, and Russ. We recorded a sample podcast, and I sent it to Chris for judgment.
Chris wrote back with a couple ideas for tightening it up, but he liked it and gave us the go-ahead to start doing it regularly. And as what seemed like an afterthought at the end of that email, he wrote:
On a separate note, I’m looking for a co-editor who can spend more time on the site and its contributors than I can. Any chance that you’d be interested?
I couldn’t send my enthusiastic "yes" fast enough.
Since then, GeekDad has grown from about 75k pageviews a month to having a couple months with over 1MM pageviews and a spot on the Technorati Top 100 blogs list. We’ve gotten to meet some really cool people, give away some great prizes, and have lots of fun celebrating being geeks and being parents. But for me, the best part is being connected to group of cool people from all over the US and all over the world, who all share a passion for our kids, and for all the things that make us geeks.
In the time since I joined GeekDad, I’ve written hundreds of posts (maybe near a thousand, now), and there have been a few memorable ones. But the best so far was getting an email from a mom, asking the GeekDads for help in picking a computer or digital reading device for her autistic son. It blew me away that our little site had come so far that someone would come to us for advice on something so important. I wrote a post asking for suggestions from our community, and we got loads of them. I’m still so proud!
I hope you’ll all enjoy reading our GeekDad stories today, and keep coming back to our site. We all really love being able to entertain and inform you, and we plan to keep on doing it for many years to come.
