One Year of MySI!

If you check the blog archive, you will notice the first blog entry I made was on October 15th, 2007. Thus, today marks the 1 year anniversary of My Steeped IdentiTEA!!

During the year:

There have been major changes throughout the year. This is my first (and only) blog, so when I started it, I had very little knowledge about blogging and very little knowledge about the subject I was blogging about - tea. When I set up the blog I simply used my two favorite colors, black and green.

I became busy with work and college classes so I didn’t do much to the cosmetics of the blog; I just concentrated on taking pictures and writing posts. I loved my teaware so much that I felt like they needed to have posts of their own, so I wrote about that at first. Then, I used the blog to keep notes on teas that I’ve tasted.

I found out later about doing “reviews” of the teas that I had obtained. It was great because these reviews let me keep notes about what teas that I’ve tried and it provided an honest customer opinion for people looking to buy tea.

I was shaky about how to do a review at first. I wasn’t sure what all information was needed to provide a descent review (which is why my reviews were freakishly long). However, hopefully I’m starting to get the hang of it.

During the summer of 2008, I was not working and taking only one college course so I had loads of time on my hands. Because of that, I started playing around with the color scheme and layout of the blog.

As you can see, I finally decided on the colors of black, orange, yellow, red, and brown. I felt like these colors enhanced the pictures of tea that I was taking. It took several weeks, but I taught myself HTML so I could edit the blog layout to have three columns with the color scheme and layout that I had picked out.

This last year with this blog has definitely been a huge learning experience with blogging and with tea. I have learned so much about both. My only problem has just been finding time to post.

What is to come:

I am still making changes to the layout of the blog to see what works best. Because of that, I welcome any and all feedback to anything about my blog (seriously! I love comments!).

More reviews are on the way! Several teas have been sent to me and I am eager to try them and post about them. While school is in session, the only time I have to do reviews is on the weekends… hence the long periods of time between posts.

I am hoping to fix that by not just posting reviews. I would like to start posting about other tea related events, whether it is news, useful information, my observations, comments, and/or findings concerning tea, etc.

Another new thing that will, hopefully, come up in a few months is me obtaining a better camera. The camera that I use now is my parent’s cheap digital camera. It’s a great camera for pictures of people or objects three feet away with a lot of natural light that only needs an auto focus. However, I need a camera that can take excellent close up shots of tea leaves, the liquor of the tea, and all of the other details. More than likely I will need something with a manual focus and zooming capabilities, among other things, but I know nothing about cameras and photography as of this moment.

So, in the next couple of months I will be looking up everything I can about getting the right camera for me with the right features at the right price. If you any photography advice to offer, I would greatly appreciate it!

Therefore, that is what is to come in the following months. I hope to have another great year of learning new things and sharing new ideas. Thanks for staying with me for this long! I hope to not disappoint in the years to come… because I’m just getting started!