Today Think Wilder turns five.
It some ways it seems like just yesterday that I had the idea to start a blog, but in fact it was many moons ago. And technically it wasn’t just “a blog”—it was another blog. There were two starter blogs before this one that I eventually shut down after they ran out of steam. The first focused on reviewing cigars at a time in my life when I was obsessed with cigars. The second blog had loads of book reviews, mostly in the science fiction and what I dubbed “psychedelic literature” genres. But something told me I should give blogging a third try, and I listened.
And I’m glad I did. This blog (and later, my YouTube channel) have been a much-needed creative outlet for me. I’ve learned a lot over the years by:
Providing 252 weekly link roundups and 7 monthly/yearly recaps chock-full of psychedelic news
Giving my two cents on plenty of books and films
Getting comfortable with being vulnerable by sharing bits and pieces of my personal life
And things are just now starting to heat up. I’ve got plenty of things that I am working on and I am looking forward to being able to share them with you as they become ready.
Every year I celebrate my blogiversary by announcing improvements to the site. Here’s what I did to celebrate the first four blogiversaries at Think Wilder:
2016: A site redesign that made it easier to navigate around the blog
2017: I made a commitment to write more feature posts for the site
2018: The creation of three new pages (Start Here, Hire Me, and Support), a Patreon account, and an option to give a one-time PayPal donation
2019: Think Wilder brand logos and a Link Posts archive
This year’s site improvement is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. It’s a navigational enhancement that builds on last year’s Link Posts archive page. In addition to that archive, there are now five brand-new category archive pages:
They are located under the Categories menu in the navigational bar at the top of the site. These archive pages make it super easy to locate the entire catalog of posts in each category without having to page through them manually at a snail’s pace (five posts at a time).
For the last few years I kept putting off this project until I made a final decision about whether or not to continue covering all psychoactive drugs in my roundups and recaps, which I just decided against recently. That’s partially because I knew that it would lock me into an organizational structure for the blog and I didn’t want to paint myself into a corner that I might want to escape from in the future. And it’s partially because I knew that it was going to take forever to build the Weekly Psychedelic Links archive page. Which turned out to be true.
But these archive pages are finally done, and I’m really happy with them. I hope you are too.
In addition to completing my category archive pages project I also separated the Psychedelics, Spirituality, and Technology topics from the Categories menu in the top navigational bar and put them under a new menu option called Topics. I think that makes it the blog’s main areas of focus a bit more obvious than before, and it looks better too.
So here’s to five years. I can’t wait to see what the next five bring. And I hope you’ll join along for the ride. Until next time, keep thinking wilder y’all.