Just kidding, Unknown. Unfortunately, while I hope to put together a simple 20PM get-together sometime soon so many of us can finally meet in person, I haven't had a chance to do so yet, so there isn't an in-person birthday party for the site, although we can consider this thread our virtual birthday party. Yup, the site, in some form or another, has been around for a year now...
On September 17, 2006, I registered TwentyPeacefulMinutes.com; I toyed around with different ideas and designs for a couple of days, and finally got the software I ended up selecting up and running and posted the first blog post to the site at about 2AM on September 19, 2006 (a year later, and I still haven't kicked my night-owl habit). So the site is now a year old! If I wasn't trying to eat a bit healthier lately, I'd buy Cold Stone ice cream birthday cakes for everyone.
I started the site with just the blog - no discussion forums, and even the blog was a bit more basic than it is now. I originally intended to use the site primarily as a personal blog for friends and family describing our move from the Mid-Cities area to Forney, which everyone seemed to think was "way out east". I decided to setup a personal blog about it all because I was amazed at how out of date most peoples perceptions of Forney were. After we moved out here, we fell in love with Forney and all it has to offer, and I began thinking of the site more as a way to letting people know about how great life was in Forney as opposed to just a personal blog.
From there, it just took on a life of its own - Google picked up the site, people started hearing about it and telling their neighbors, and before I knew it, people were contacting me asking me to confirm rumors they had been hearing about the next big store that was opening in Forney. I got to know some cool people around Forney who helped me verify many of those rumors and who really helped spread the word about the site.
As the site was growing, it seemed like there was something more I could offer our home town - I had a catchy domain name, and a good number of people from Forney visiting the site, so I started brainstorming what else people might find useful on the site, and started looking to add new features.
One of the first things I thought of was a discussion forum, but I debated for some time if I should setup a forum or not, since I didn't know if Forney really needed 2 discussion forums (which seems a little funny in retrospect, since now we're up to, what, 4, general Forney discussion forums?) - I setup the discussion forum on the site in late October/early November, but held off announcing the forums or making them public.
However, around the time of the November election, while debating one of the bond issues on ABetterForney, the oldest, dare I say, original, Forney discussion forums, I went to find some data from an earlier post I had made there and noticed that older posts were pruned fairly often, I guess due to space constraints. I wanted to have a forum where everything, be it good or bad, was archived and available for reference, so I decided to go ahead and slowly start letting people know about the discussion forums I had setup on 20PM.
On November 11, 2006, the first user registered for the discussion forums, and it was January 17th before 10 people had registered on the forums. On April 17th, we had 30 members. Around July, we hit 100 members, and now we're up to 212. Looking at the stats for the past few months, only about 4% of the people who view the site create an account on the discussion forum, so thanks to the roughly 200 people who have taken the time to create an account, and to those that are active in the discussions here on the site - y'all keep things interesting and fun around here.
