Almost four years ago, in December of 2007, this site made an anonymous debut. I didn’t announce it anywhere, didn’t link to it, just put the site up – then hosted on Blogger – and wrote three posts. I made a conscious decision to wait to do anything else until I knew I could commit to a regular schedule. In March of 2008, I decided that the time had come and since then post has been added to post to finally reach the nice round number of 500.

Some months, reaching or even exceeding my own target of 8-12 posts has been easy, at other times, I’ve fallen short of my goal. However, what has kept me going relatively strong this entire time has been all the joy and inspiration I get from the Daredevil comic itself, as well as the community of fellow fans that keep coming back to this site, commenting or in other ways engaging with the content. I cannot thank you enough!

New contributor

I had some pretty lofty goals for post number five hundred, some of which I’ll get to later in the fall (such as setting up a bona fide resource section), but the time got away from me and I wanted to get this milestone post up before going to my very first New York Comic Con in less than eight hours. One thing I did manage to arrange however, was to reach out to a new recruit. I decided that the time had come to try to branch out a bit, and get more than my own views represented here, so I asked frequent commenter – and former guest post writer – Aaron K whether he’d be interested in coming on board as a TOMP contributor (now doesn’t that sound fancy?) on a one post per month basis, at least to start. Now, this new addition is not reason for me to slack off, rather it’s an opportunity to bring in some new blood. Aaron’s first post will be up next week!

A look back

I know many of you have been TOMP readers for a long time, but there are some who may be new to this site. Regardless of which category you belong to, I thought it might be fun to show you two previous incarnations of this site. The first one is from the Blogger days when, for the first few months, this site could be found at theothermurdockpapers.blogspot.com.

In the fall of 2009, I decided to move the site to self-hosted WordPress, and for a while, it had the below appearance:

As you might guess, I like to change the look of the site occasionally (without losing too much in the process in terms of branding), and I’ll probably change it again some time in the future, as more content is added.

Ways to connect

For many of you, this won’t be news (and the info is already on the site), but I’d like to take the opportunity to once again remind new and old readers alike of the ways you can keep up with new posts.

1. I always post information about new posts on my Twitter account and the TOMP Facebook page.
2. You can also subscribe to posts via email or by using the RSS feed.
3. You can also follow new comments site-wide, by subscribing to the main comment RSS feed.

In closing

Here’s to the first 500 posts! I hope you’ll all stick around for the next 500 and beyond, and thanks again for all the comments and words of encouragement over the years. Now, I’m off to NYCC!