1 Year blogging. Thanks to you!

You have 89 posts, 2 pages, 1 draft, contained within 8 categories and 34 tags. You have 1,921 total comments, 1,921 approved, 0 spam and 0 awaiting moderation. You are using the Platformate theme with 3 widgets. This is WordPress version 2.6.1. Akismet has protected your site from 3,595 spam comments already, but there’s nothing in your spam queue at the moment.

Your blog covers your personal stuffs, stupid inessentials, thoughts about your deeply-beloved Indonesia, those nerdy chemical engineering articles, and the popular (here, at least) WordPress and themes posts that brought more 50GB traffic a month and forced you to do several hosting upgrades. In the end of July and September, your blog was inaccessible because you have exceeded your bandwidth limit and then you decided to move your blog to an unlimited web hosting.

You started everything without any sufficient knowledge and skills. You had been familiar with image processing software and you had already loved graphic designing so much. But back then, you had no idea how to deal with WordPress, web hosting, domains, and FTP. PHPMyAdmin and MySQL were something bizarre. You were inspired by a friend to have your own domain and he convinced you that domains was not something expensive and you could have it for a very low price.

Started with michaeljubel.com, you wrote totally-insignificant personal stuffs here. I mean, it’s totally inessentials, thanks for the name. Please recall those 2 articles wrapped-as-a-movie-review but inside, you’re grumbling about your unique lecture at school. And also those 2 articles stating that TU Delft was your dream. A month after, your nationalism was about to burst and you decided to write something about Indonesian tourism. There were some, some, some, some Indonesia-related stuffs back then and finally at the end of the year, you decided to launch your first WordPress theme, Linoluna.

Oops, one thing, don’t forget that you ever wrote several funny articles regarding the Durex ad, your pathetic theory of life, and those sexy models posing for Diesel ad stating their own perspective of global warming.

On May, you launched your second Worpress theme, Arthemia, and a month after, in the middle of your compulsory internship at PT Pertamina UP II Dumai (it’s in rural Sumatra), you decided to design a new WordPress theme and named it after the platinum-based catalytic reformation process: Platformate. Well, you really had a bad taste for names. And anyway, what were you doing there? Shouldn’t you be busy with school stuffs?

Anyway, on August, you moved your blog to a new domain, michaelhutagalung.com, for two personal reasons. Several days after, you launched your WordPress premium theme: Arthemia Premium and you’ve been so happy with the sales. Just now, you’ve launched your second paid theme: Platformate.

You really want to thank Rumahweb.com, Qwords.com, and Hostmonster.com for providing you the web hosting service. You learned a lot from them, their system, and everything. You also want to thank the online documentation of PHP and MySQL for being such a huge life-saver. And your biggest and deepest thank goes to WordPress and their WordPress Codex that is constantly showing up at your laptop screen every day.

You also thank your readers for coming by to your blog, commenting your posts, giving trackbacks and linking you from their websites. Please don’t give up giving theme support even though the issue has been asked 7749815345 times and there is already a solution to that issue. In addition, you want to personally thank some people: Hanna (for being such a lovely girlfriend; your blog to me and you to Michael), Sherwin (“horas Lae!”, I believe Michael will say that), Mya, Andika (your English impressed Michael a lot), Calvin (you have an unbelievably-impressive twisted mind), Christin, Yonna, and Marisa (your English makes Michael crazy). And especially for YanYan; although ydoea.com is expired already because he is now busy with his job at Halliburton.

Michael, I know you’ve been so busy with everything that you do not have time to congratulate me for this my belated 1st birthday. I wish you good luck with your school, with the comprehensive examination in March, and please finish that PT Pertamina UP II Dumai internship report. You must thank God for everything you’ve accomplished and for every single cent you’ve earned. Never stop learning again and again.

Happy birthday to me.

PS. Ah finally, this blog becomes personal again. At least this time. :D

Illustration by craftaholic.