Today is Good Bloggie!‘s fifth anniver­sary. What started in 2006 as a way to share news and hap­pen­ings about our Frenchies with friends and fam­ily (and to check out this new blog­ging craze and try a hand at design­ing for the web) has amaz­ingly grown into an often vis­ited resource for peo­ple want­ing to learn more about French Bull­dogs, what they are like, and the top­ics asso­ci­ated with them. Today we are going to devi­ate from our favorite topic, indulge our­selves, and talk about the blog and how it came to be.

Let’s start at the begin­ning: our first Frenchie and the one that started it all. It’s amaz­ing to think how a trip in Jan­u­ary of 1999 changed our lives so much. We drove four hours to check out a six-month-old Frenchie girl as a pos­si­ble fit for us and our pet Boston, Gul­liver. Locat­ing an avail­able Frenchie was much more dif­fi­cult back then and when we heard she was a brindle pied with a Hag­gerty spot on of her head, some­thing our mis-matched Boston had, we had to go check her out. Gee, have you already guess the out­come to this visit? Lucy was our first French Bull­dog and in her sweet, quiet way lead us down the Frenchie path we’ve been on ever since.

The amount of infor­ma­tion avail­able about the breed has dras­ti­cally changed from when we came home with Lucy. There wasn’t much printed infor­ma­tion and the inter­net was still fairly new with not many dog peo­ple post­ing to it yet, not to men­tion how slow dial-up was. Now there is so much avail­able about the breed, dog care, dog activ­i­ties and dogs in gen­eral, the choices and sources can be over­whelm­ing and confusing.

We started the blog as an adjunct to the main web­site: Ebul­lient! French Bull­dogs. Soon the blog took on a life of its own. Some­times it’s as if the blog is another pet in the house; requir­ing atten­tion, main­te­nance, and “feed­ing” to keep it alive. We are just grate­ful it hasn’t learned to death yodel…yet.

Not only have we have learned more about the French Bull­dog breed by blog­ging – often as a result of research­ing a topic for an entry – our posts have helped many peo­ple and we have “met” some very nice folks online. Good Blog­gie! has daily vis­its from all states and coun­tries by peo­ple want­ing to learn about this breed or about a related topic (and, no, they aren’t all bots!). Hear­ing that a post helps some­one find the answer or points them in the right direc­tion has cer­tainly been a source of encour­age­ment to stick with blog­ging. Another rea­son to blog: the joy of shar­ing what great dogs Frenchies are along with shar­ing the breed’s pros and cons and ways to respon­si­bly find a French Bull­dog – for the pro­tec­tion of the dog, the breed, and future pet owners.

Good Blog­gie! has remained fairly loyal to the tagline, “A small blog about all things Frenchie,” but top­ics some­times extend to other breeds or all dogs, and not all vis­i­tors are Frenchie-centric. As a way to grow, we are chang­ing our tagline a smidgen to, “A small blog about most things Frenchie.” Our niche is still French Bull­dogs but this allows a lit­tle wig­gle room when top­ics cover other dog– or pet-related topics.

Another way to cel­e­brate our fifth year anniver­sary is a new domain address. Check out the url in the address bar at top. See the change? Good Blog­gie! now lives at www.goodbloggie.com. A much friend­lier url, eas­ier to remem­ber and spell. While there is an auto­matic redi­rect from the old address to the new address, go ahead and update any links or RSS feeds you may have to us right now.

This move is a big deal because it meant migrat­ing data­base files to a new loca­tion. A scary ven­ture with five years of con­tent involved and no expe­ri­ence mov­ing live web­site files. Man­aged to pull it off with only the loss of the Blogroll and a big chunk of sleep. (Remem­ber the goal of learn­ing more about the how blog­ging and the web works?) The Blogroll (list of links to the right) is cur­rently being rebuilt and should be back soon, along with some blog entry images which need relink­ing. Paired with the move was a needed upgrade of the theme (how the blog looks) which should make vis­it­ing and load­ing the site faster and eas­ier. Hope­fully all this is trans­par­ent to you.

Good Blog­gie! is now on it’s third or fourth theme and while the con­tent remains, the look and func­tion has cer­tainly improved over the years. A good time for a shout out to WordPress.org and all the peo­ple who cre­ate won­der­ful themes, plu­g­ins, and sup­port Free or GNU soft­ware, which is about cre­at­ing soft­ware peo­ple can use to cre­ate, build, and expand upon, not about get­ting things for free (even though down­load­ing and using the soft­ware is free.) If you’ve ever thought about blog­ging, we can rec­om­mend Word­Press as a plat­form. There is an even eas­ier ver­sion at WordPress.com for peo­ple just start­ing out.

Because we didn’t make screen cap­tures as the years went past, we are shar­ing one favorite post from each of the past five years. As the dog show judges say when they are award­ing the big rib­bons, “All present are wor­thy of con­sid­er­a­tion, but today the win­ners are:…”

2006 — Snicker, snuf­fle, snort, purr?

2007 — The dog that ate our vacation

2008 — Our most pop­u­lar blog entry

2009 — Da da da da da da…Da CAT TOY!

2010 — The Sep­tem­ber Issue — Paris je t’aime shoot

Thanks for let­ting us prat­tle about the blog itself today and don’t for­get to sub­scribe using the the RSS feed but­ton at the top of the right-side col­umn or fol­low us on Twit­ter which alerts you to new post­ings. We are still learn­ing about French Bull­dogs, about blog­ging, and about cre­at­ing con­tent for the web. You just never know what we might post next.