Well, yesterday was the 1 year anniversary of "Bestest Blog." Yep, it was one year ago today that I featued my very first review. 2000 blogs, over a half million page views, over 100 reviews, and 366 days later this site has fizzled out. While this page was great in its hey-day, it's popularity exceeded my ability to keep up with it. Even with the help of some wonderful guest reviewers, adding over 100 links a week and other site maintenance called for 20+ hours of work a week, on top of my full time job.

So, in my mind, I went back to the drawing board. This blog was doomed from the beginning. Its setup required me to do everything by hand. So, I did some research and figured out that PHP combined with MySQL was the optimal way to make a site like this more user-driven and automatic. Inspired by sites like StumbleUpon, I decided to take it just beyond finding great blogs to read every day, but to find cool images, videos, games, resources, and any other kind of website you can think of.

And so spawned the idea for Blankest Blank. Sure it will have a daily "best blog of the day" feature, but it will have a lot more! I'm really excited for this, and this time I'm thinking big. Almost everything will be automated, so this will give me time to improve and add ideas as opposed to spending all my time keeping the current ideas afloat.

You can already submit your blog into a preliminary vote for "best blog". At this point it is just more or less a test, but those who have submitted their blogs (or had their blogs submitted by me) have seen in the area of 50-100 visits to their site.

I am adding new features every day. Like today I just made it so each user (IP address) could only vote once for each site. This will do wonders as far as preventing abuse and vote tampering down the road. Plus you can easily flag inappropriate sites and there's easy links so you can check out some really great sites in depth. And one of my best friends and partner in this endeavour have gotten the ball rolling on the visuals. He is an expert at making sites look good (and I am not as you can tell by looking at this site).

As I mentioned in the comments section of the previous post, in honor of the 1 year anniversary of Bestest Blog, I plan on having a vote for "Bestest Blog of the Year" through Blankest Blank. Any blog that won blog of the day in the past year will automatically be entered. The winner will receive a prize (maybe like $50 or so) and of course some nice publicity. But before that can happen, I need to get the site a little bit further along. Maybe another week or two at most.

In the mean time, I invite you to check out what the site has to offer, alert me if you find any bugs or any unexpected error messages pop up, maybe submit your favorite joke and rate some other funny ones.