Come Here To Me!

Some reflections on our first birthday….

dfallon: A lot can change in a year. Interestingly, it is exactly a year today since we began this blog. It emerged, as hxci reminded me, out of a conversation in The Flowing Tide. At a History Ireland Hedge School in Phibsboro, a member of the panel refered to Come Here To Me! To me as a “mix of the Communist Party of Ireland and Saint Patrick’s Athletic”. Certainly, both have been known to feature! Much else has too.

The city herself has changed a lot in a year. It’s been an infuriating few months. Dublin, in some ways, has taken a serious fall from grace. Yet the blog is a tribute to Dublin, and not just the back alleys and highstreets of Dublin 1 and 2.

Much thanks goes to others in the blogging community of course. Pue’s Occurrences, the excellent group history blog, invited us to partake in a symposium for example, at a time when we were still a relatively new blog. Others, in particular the Irish Election Literature Blog, have sent on wonderful material that ended up here.

On a personal note, the highlights have been the blogs engagements with what is often reffered to as ‘the real world’. The 1916 And After walking tour I provided in the capital is one example, but others have included an Irish Blog Awards nomination and occasional appearances in printed word publications. Here’s to another year.

hXci: One year on and all has changed, changed utterly. Not necessarily for the good either. As the country has sank deeper into the mire, we’ve done our best on here to provide a balance between history, music, football and social commentary to keep people’s minds off things. And considering we did this fairly off the cuff after having a discussion about it in the Flowing Tide, I don’t think we’ve done a bad job. We’ve come a long way in a year, I think it has taken that for us to find our feet, so hopefully this next year will only get better; it sometimes surprises me the kind of articles that take off and get large numbers of hits or comments, but it’s always a nice surprise.

Getting shortlisted in the Irish Blog Awards  after only being in existence a few short months was certainly one of the highlights of the year, but what really buoys me about this project is the amount of feedback we get on here as well as in the “real world.” We have close enough twice as many comments as we have articles  and if anything, that suggests an interested readership; if we can maintain that, I’ll be happy come 29th November 2011.

Support from the online community, everyone from the diehards on League of Ireland forums like thebohs.com to those on similar blogs like Cedar Lounge Revolution and Pue’s Occurrences has been pretty fantastic, as has the real world support from the likes of History Ireland and down to the people who over pints tell you that they enjoy what we’re doing, a major thanks to all of you.

Who knows what the next year might hold in store, but no doubt, you’ll be getting more of the same on here. All the best!

JCarax As already mentioned, this blog celebrates its first birthday today. We published our first article on the blog on November 29 2009.

The history of the blog goes back a little further than that. I managed to find an old email in my inbox from the 14 September 2009 entitled simply ‘we should start a blog together’ which I had sent out to DFallon and hxci. It’s fantastic to be able to look at the initial discussion about what we should focus on and what we should call the blog. (Some of the other suggestions were OneAndOne.wordpress.com, UpToNinety.wordpress.com and KeepSketch.wordpress.com)

The last year has been a great success and the numbers speak for themselves. 100,000+ views, 500+ posts and 1,000+ comments. The only reason this blog has worked is because of the fantastic interaction between the articles and readers. I probably can speak for the others as well when I say that we value comments a lot more than views.

I don’t feel I’m exaggerating when I say that CHTM! has opened up an online platform, for aspects of Dublin music, politics, history and football, that wasn’t there before. We’ve also worked hard to help upload pamphlets, pictures and music that might have been otherwise forgotten or left gathering dust forever.

Special thanks to Conor (Dublin Opinion), Ciaran (Cedar Lounge Revolution), Antrophe (Soundtracksforthem.com), anarchaeologist, Mark H., my uncles John F. and Donal M. and everyone else who have helped us along the way. Here’s to another 12 months.