It is almost hard to believe that I posted my first entry 1 year ago today! Since then I have made 118 posts and this blog has garnered over 23,000 hits. It has been more successful and more widely received than I could have imagined. As I mentioned in the very first post, this blog is the reincarnation of my former Diner Hotline column that appeared in the SCA NewsJournal and then Journal magazine for almost 19 years.
I retired the column around the beginning of September, 2007 and SCA member Brian Butko who had just started the Lincoln Highway News Blog…. (http://www.lincolnhighwaynews.com/) knowing I wanted to continue with a different version of Diner Hotline, emailed me in October and suggested I start a blog.
Well soon after I started this, I realized it was what Diner Hotline should have always been! Of course when I started writing the Hotline at the end of 1988, there was no internet per se. In fact I wrote the first few Hotlines by printing with pen & paper (my handwriting is not so hot). I then sent the handwritten document to the SCA NewsJournal editor who transcribed it into a wordperfect document or some such thing.
The next iteration was to borrow a small dos computer from my brother and use another word processing program (wordstar?) for the next few years. I printed that out on an old dot matrix printer and sent it off where again it got transcribed to be printed in the magazine.
At the end of 1995, I got my first Windows 95 computer and started writing the Hotlines in QuarkXpress which eventually the copy from these Quark documents were copy and pasted into emails and sent off! By then I had scanning capability and was also able to send jpeg images along with the copy as well as developing the Diner Hotline logo which now appears at the top of my blog.
Thanks go out to everyone who regularly reads this! The fact that you are checking this out on a regular basis makes it all worthwhile!
Diner Hotline Weblog 