2 years and 85.000 visits later

Welcome airship enthusiasts,
Airshipworld is a new Blog about anything Airship and nothing but Airships, if they are LTA or HTA doesn't matter, what matters is that we are wanting to bring the community together. This site should become the central hub for all Airship news, events, announcements, sightings and everything else of interest for the Airship community. In the next weeks there is going to be a lot happening, so stay tuned.

It was 2 years ago when I posted these lines and started this little experiment called "The Airshipworld Blog". Since then I have learned a lot about blogging, the airship industry and of course airships. I have met many great people and made contact to the Airship Association, the DGLR, IsoPolar and others. It is still hard to believe that 2 years ago no one in the community knew me. Thanks for letting me in and helping me to become a part of the community. I started with a simple Blogger blog template which was more or less suited for the Airshipworld Blog.
The template was nothing special but it was good enough to get the word out and to publish. With visitor numbers increasing it made sense to put up some ads to get a little kick back for my blogging work, and by the end of 2007 I had made enough money to get a full Domain with web space and all the bells and whistles someone could ask for. Airshipworld.info was born. In January 2008 we also did our first design refresh, moving away from the Blogger theme to a theme completely designed for Airshipworld.

This was how the blog looked ever since January 2008, visitor numbers grew fast to over 8000 visits a month in Summer 2008, this was probably also related to the many events that happened in 2008, like the Zeppelin NT #4 that was flying over London and then later transported to the US for Airship Ventures. Just look into the archives of 2008 it's crazy how much had happened, we even released our first Software the Gertler Series 58 Generator.
As the year came to a close I had to slow down a little with the blog but kept working on Airshipworld as much as my time permitted. End of February 2009 we were proud to announce the Airshipworld Event Calendar, which is a collaborative Calendar solely dedicated to capture Airship and Lighter-Than-Air events all around the world. We have many features planned, but are also looking for your contributions, to make the Calendar a central place for the airship community to contribute and find events.
Another big step forward in 2008 was that I attended two important Airship Events last year, the first one was the International Airship Convention in Friedrichshafen the other one was the Airship Association Annual Symposium. I was allowed to film the sessions of both events, so the video of all the sessions is captured and preserved for history. I am working with the Airship Association and the DGLR on how to publish the videos, it will take a while to work out everything in regards to copyrights and licensing but once we cracked that nut we should be able to launch a video portal for session videos from conferences.

For this year I will record the Sessions of the DGLR Workshop XI and plan on coming to the Airships to the Arctic Symposium in Calgary this fall. So there is lot's of material coming. If you have experience with publishing video on the internet both the legal and technical aspects please contact me any help is highly appreciated. We are also bringing you an upgraded layout for the Blog, that aligns with the layouts of the Forum and the Events Calendar and we are planing on providing more services, beyond the Blog and utilizing the Website Airshipworld.info more. I will still blog but am in desperate need for contributing editors, so if you are interested please send an email.
So now after 2 years and 85.000 visits all that's left to say is Happy Birthday Airshipworld.

Happy 1st Birthday to Airshipworld

© Adventure Balloons

Yes you are reading right. Airshipworld just got 1 year old. This day March 25th 2007 we started with this project. And now 1 year and 220 blog posts later we can celebrate our first anniversary. I want to thank everyone who helped us along the way, all the support and positive feedback we got from the community and members of the industry. I want to thank everyone who subcribed to the Blog via email or the RSS feed and get their daily dose of airship news delivered right to them every time we post something. I want to thank the more than 10 000 unique visitors that visited the blog more than 20 000 times and generated almost 45 000 pageviews. A special thanks goes out to those that supported us financially with donations and of course I want to thank my family, because they had to bear me spending hours writing blog posts and researching new articles on the web.
We are still a relatively new and small Blog but we want to continue to grow, so that we have an even more successful second year. Looking back at the first year of blogging three events stuck out of the statistics, unfortunately two of them were also the saddest moment. The first was the destruction of the Zeppelin NT Prototype in Botswana in September 2007. The second was the destruction of the Total Pole Airship January 2008. Those two events were also the most work intensive ones. A more positive spike followed the surfacing of the Lockheed Martin P-791 video. There were many more events that I enjoy remembering like the RC-Airship Regatta in Munich or the Airship Parade in Bad Homburg at both events we were able to shot some great exclusive video that has been featured on the Blog.
We have really been able to establish a world wide readership on all 6 continents in 119 countries and more than 3500 cities. Check out this map to see where the Airshipworld readers came from.

The darker the green the more visitors came from the country, so as you can see the USA with more than 40% of the visits is the darkest, followed by Germany and the UK with each more than 10% of the visitors. The remaining 40% of the visitors is scattered all over the world making Airshipworld a truly international Blog. Thanks again for your continued support and for reading the blog. Continue to spread the word.
Our next big project is the Airshipworld Conference and our quest for Speakers, feedback and ideas are always welcome. By the end of this week we will give you an update and a preliminary programme so if you want to present your project or hold a presentation hurry and let us know. To another great year of airship blogging.