Well Preserved

We have made it!

Well Preserved was born 365 days ago – our official birthday is on the 28th but this is our last day of being “0.”

We haven`t missed a day of posting in the entire year – a surprise considering the launching of this site was a spontaneous act (we told the story of the origin here and are going to avoid being redundant).  We have decided to continue the journey for an unspecified time to go (I make temporary contracts with myself for things such as these) and hope you will continue to join our adventures.

Today is a short post looking over the last year – tomorrow`s will look at the year ahead and some of the new directions we have planned for the blog.

We have met many friends – physically and virtually from around the world.  Twitter has been a new discovery and we have been fortunate to meet many farmers, chefs, food activists and passionate foodies through the course of the year.

We ran out of topics that we could write on from a place of any authority around March.  Preserving season relieved some pressure and gave us the incentive that we could make an entire year.  Writing without topics has been an exciting prospect to me – it makes us learn something new about food all the time – I would guess that writing this blog has forced me into a pattern of studying 10-15 new things about food every week.  I really think that we have learned more than anyone else from the blog.

We have also been graced with traffic that we could have never guessed.  We had our 40,000th hit this week – well beyond any expectations we could have set at the start of the year.  We were impressed with the 800 visits we had in January – the growth has been exciting and humbling.

Thank you to each of you who has visited, shared the site with others and shared our passions.

A big thanks to those of you who have shared our tweets and helped bring other friends and strangers to our home.  A similar thanks to those who have emailed us, shared their journeys, passions, results of their preserving journeys and inspiration.

I want to extend a special thank you to each of you who post comments.  There is nothing as exciting to me as seeing people sharing their own info, creating dialogue and conversing back and forth with us and each other.  It is one of my goals to encourage more community and more sharing back and forth here next year.  We really would love to foster dialogue over monologue and encourage and welcome you all to continue to share your comments and comment further.

Smiles and thanks for coming along for the ride!