State of Cookie: MilkandCookies Turns Seven and the Year 2007 in Review

Happy Birthday MilkandCookies!!!

Though many other elements started coming together before this date, January 3rd 2001 was the first post to the site. Seems like an official enough day to start with.

Thank you to everyone who has supported the site. I say it all the time, MilkandCookies would not have made it this far without the community that has formed around it. ;)

State of the Cookie: 2007 in Review

2007 was a great year for MilkandCookies.

I finally quit my day job at Adobe, after ten years in the computer software field (2 1/2 at LizardTech and 7 1/2 at Adobe). January 5th, 2007 was my last day there. Ever since then, I have been dedicated exclusively to MilkandCookies and the MilkandCookies Network.

Bryan, who had been contracting for MilkandCookies for a couple of month in his free time, joined us around January 15th as a programmer and a database ETL specialist. Having never programmed in Python before, he picked up on it in a matter of weeks (this is common actually becasue Python is such a great language) and was soon an expert in Django, a database driven, web framework written in Python.

Bryan designed the database and it's interaction with the code, while I remained in charge of achitecture, usability, layout and design. We officially rolled out the completely rewritten site June 9th, 2007. This was an important milestone because the old code design was too rigid for the kind of new features we wanted to add. The new code is more abstract, extensible, scalable and most importantly faster. You can read more about it in the original announcement article: New MilkandCookies.com on the Rise.

On a sad note, our beloved graphic designer, Laura, decided to further her education in 3D graphic design. She was unable to continue contracting with us due to her increased workload with her day job and night school. Laura is responsible for all the main graphics on MilkandCookies and the majority of the graphics on the Network sites. We love Laura, wish her the best, and look forward to working with her again soon. You can check out some of her work on the Themes page.

In the final personnel change of the year, Bryan returned to the "legitimate" job market in the middle of December 2007. Bryan worked hard and enthusiastically all year, putting in more hours that he was paid for on a wage that was far below his talents. We had agreed on a one year commitment, which we fell roughly one month shy of. Bryan had no trouble finding a new job in the field at which he excels, ETL.

Bryan is still deeply invested in the site, both as an avid user and our only other full Administrator besides myself. He will continue to work in an advisory role for technical issues as well as being open to contract work when necessary. If we can afford him in the future, we will gladly hire him back. We wish him luck in his career and are grateful for his hard work, his enthusiasm and his inspiration.

This leaves me to revert to my role managing all the responsibilities of the site other than those which are currently available to the MilkandCookies community. My plan is to continue to, through changes to the code, give more and more responsibilities over to the users. Many of these responsibilities are currently available to Moderators, and after they have been well tested, will become available to users who have shown a personal interest in the health and vitality of the site through meaningful voting, commenting, submitting and feedback. Stay tuned.

We have many plans for 2008. But I am going to reserve commenting on that for a future post. I will add that this year has taught me, among other things, that we can do better advertising. There is a groundswell of traditional advertising making it's way into the web. Google has been great for us, but we have little control over what ads are placed on the site. We are looking for direct partnerships with companies that are "relevant to our interests" rather than the sometimes random feel we sometimes get from the AdSense system. To this end we started contacting companies directly and started publicizing some of our statistics. More on this in our Advertising FAQ.

MilkandCookies not an aggressive advertiser. And we often shoot ourselves in the foot by minimizing our efforts to "monitize' the site, instead favoring content and "user experience". If we wanted to devote a section of the site to boobies and "hilarious" injuries, we could really pull in the traffic and thus cash. This is also true if we were to sanitize the site by banning issues controversial to a typical "family" focussed advertiser; issues like nudity, politics, religion, racism, etc. But I don't want to do either of those, I believe the quality of the site, such as it is, would degrade irrevocably. Instead we operate between these extremes. Basically, if I wanted to sell out, I would work at Microsoft. (*shutters*)

But to our credit, we have a significant number of very loyal users, all of you reading this, and this is what matters most to me personally. I prefer things to happen organically, but I have started to underastand that a certain amount of PR, self marketing and networking is necessary. Though these are not where my better talents lie, I am forcing myself to learn the ropes. In the mean time, you can help evangelize by posting links to our site and telling your friends about MilkandCookies. The more the merrier. ;)

Thank You for Your Support

I want to give a special thanks our team of Moderators who volunteer their time working behind the scenes fixing links, editing text, adding tags, monitoring abuse, giving feedback, featuring content, beta testing and bug reporting, among countless other ever increasing responsibilities. I could never do all the work required to manage this site alone. I run most ideas by them before jumping and and their feedback has been invaluable, especially with the rewrite and all the new features.

Thank you everyone for keeping MilkandCookies as vibrant and alive as it is, and may the community continue to grow and thrive. Happy Birthday to MilkandCookies and Happy New Year to all of you!!!

-- Jaxon
   Founder MilkandCookies.com