A big day for a blogger

In case you haven’t seen it – and I hadn’t known about it myself until a friend sent me an email this afternoon – an excerpt from the first of my two recent posts on the Miller press conference kerfuffle was quoted in today’s edition of the Toronto Star. I’m down at the bottom, following a bunch of much more accomplished people whose opinions deserve to carry more weight than mine.

I’m glad that the Star felt like something I said was worth repeating. Hell, I’m grateful whenever just about anyone feels like that. But it always comes as a bit of a shock when this site gets that kind of attention. I’m mainly writing for friends and family here, because I really don’t expect anybody beyond those circles to take any interest in what I have to say. And on the rare occasion that a broader audience of people does, I usually end up racing through my most recent posts in my head to make sure I haven’t said anything too offensive, immature, or just plain stupid.

I think I’ve got the good people at Mondoville to thank for this one. Not just because a lot of my post’s source material came from them, but because they were kind enough to retweet an alert on Twitter about my second post to their many followers.

Shortly after that, a city councillor took the time to ask if I’d be willing to post any responses I’d get, or to send them to him via email. I felt a little sheepish explaining that my little site didn’t tend to draw much attention, and that his response might end up being the only one that post would get. So far, that’s proven to be the case – but in retrospect, I guess it should have been a sign that I’d been getting a little more attention than usual.

At any rate, if you’re here because you read the Star this morning, then thanks for coming. I’m sorry the place is such a mess, and I promise I’ll get to that redesign real soon. I also promise to finally set up a Google Analytics account for this site so I can actually tell where people are coming from and thank referrers accordingly. While I’m at it, I’d also like to promise the people I work with that I haven’t been doing all this blogging on company time.

Lastly, let this be a reminder to all of my fellow loudmouthed introverts: if you write something on a public forum like your blog or your Twitter account, then there’s no telling how far it could unexpectedly go. We all know that, but as my good friend Sofi recently wrote in her column for Metro, we often need to be reminded of it.

That said, I’m flattered that they felt I was worth quoting. It was a much nicer surprise than that one time a few years ago when I told some people on a message board that I was looking forward to the end of the World Cup because my predominantly Portuguese neighbourhood had been really loud lately, and then some blogger from the National Post read about it and quoted it and called me a racist.

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