Happy 1st Blogiversary!

I'm very, very happy to announce that today is Standalone Sysadmin's first Blogiversary! That's right, last year at this time, I posted my Introduction and Welcome. Little did I know that less than a year later, this blog would have over 500 subscribers, have hit the Slashdot front page, and gained a loyal following of the best readers a blogger could ever ask for.

Thank you all so much. It wouldn't be possible, or even worth doing, if people out there didn't visit, read, and write comments, emails, and twitter back. You all rock.

So since it's a celebration of sorts today, let us not go without presents!

A while back (ok, like 6 months ago), I created a survey that I called the 2008 IT Admin Job (dis)Satisfaction Survey. Over the course of two weeks, 334 of you took that survey to let other people know what it was like to be you. It was an amazing amount of information. Even as the results were still coming in, I could tell that there was a lot of pent up frustration. I would have liked to have compiled the results before now, but the amount of information was so massive, and I have no experience with anything like this, that I didn't know how to approach it.

I believe I've finally got a handle on a roughly usable format. I've created an overview of the survey (.doc format) with comments from me, and because I firmly believe in the open sharing of information, I am providing a raw CSV file of the responses (with identifying information strippped) so that you can go do crazy things with the data and come up with new interesting combinations on your own. Knock yourselves out, but if you find something interesting, make sure to drop me a line, and if you publish your own findings, just point a link back to this site, if you would. (Many thanks to NoNeck for hosting these files!)

In a slightly different twist, I don't know if you've heard, but the Amazon Kindle store has been promising to make blogs available via subscription for a while, and I signed up for information a while back, and just got it today.

The short story is that you can now subscribe to Standalone Sysadmin on your Kindle. The price is currently set at $2/month, not because I particularly think that anyone will pay that (or even that it's worth that) but I haven't figured out how to lower the price yet :-)

In the meantime, if you have a kindle and you absolutely MUST read my updates, feel free to subscribe, I get something like 30% of the cost. I won't be insulted if you pass, and I'll update whenever I figure out how to lower the price.

So that's that. Year 1 in the bag, with hopefully many more to come. Thanks again everyone, I can't tell you how much I appreciate each and every one of you who comes here. Thank you and take care.

--Matt