Happy blogiversary. I always enjoy reading your blog. It’s fun to dream about trips to Hawaii or revisit my days as a Northern Californian. Hopefully when I venture North in 2009 we can connect in Santa Cruz.

Would love to write more but a five year old is tearing apart my office!!!

Dominique, I like your indie-approach. It sounds so much cooler, I’m just going to say my site is indie, which is funny in a kid/mommy site anyway.

The domain name thing was something I thought about before I started my blog because the one person I knew at the time that had a blog said not having the simple domain name from the start was one of her biggest regrets. So I registered my domain and we figured out the whole URL mapping thing from day one (I’m on TypePad, and the ease of doing that at the time with TP was one of the reasons I went with it…I’d like to get out of the standard template at one point, but there were other things I need to learn and accomplish first, so that’s down the list a ways).

Your third point is an important one, too. It’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed pretty indie and committed to a slow, but steady growth. It is particularly aggravating when for-profit sites try to get your free content so they can benefit from it. I wrote for local newspapers for a dozen years, and it’s discouraging to see how many conventional print outlets also want free content…and how many of my writer friends can no longer feed themselves in the profession.

Have fun at TBEX. It was great meeting some of the faces behind the blogs at last year’s TBEX. I have to pass this year on NYC, but I’m hoping to make more in the future.