WEST SEATTLE, Washington, August 30, 2009 (WSFB) – The first annual Summer of Blog comes to a close this week as we move from August to September, and from Summer to Late Summer. Seasonal transitions are an excellent time for reflection and providing the back story, especially when there’s so much to look back upon.

Here’s how this summer went down for the WSFB…

Late spring / early summer: Following banishment from W$B, Trensuela se

cures www.westseattlefunblog.com and provides the vehicle for the socioeconomic experiment that is funblogging.

Trensuela worked the open source code into a lather as he solidified the current layout and functionality at the WSFB. This stuff isn’t plug-n-play per se, and Trensuela made it work!

Our most valued journalistic resource, ezb, brought his writing talent to the table and raised the bar to nearly unattainable levels. With his keen wit and subtle literary style, ezb took a much needed less confrontational approach to funblogging.

May 29, 2009: WSFB Founding Father NewGuy announces on the W$B forums

that the WSFB had gone live under a topic titled “New Blog”.

The W$B community went ballistic and proceeded to rip the WSFB – and Luigilinguini in particular – to shreds by the community bloglociraptors.

Luigilinguini had already been banned from W$B forums, by request,   so all he could do was watch the carnage. The thread approached 100 replies, the majority of which demonstrated the overall disgust, hatred, appalled, and mean-spirited nature of the folks we came to hold in such contempt. NewGuy was banned soon thereafter for his transgressions.

The WSFB saw the most traffic in funblog history on Memorial Day, with over 3,000 unique visitors. This number constitutes 37.5% of W$B’s daily unique visitor count for July 2009 (8,000 “households” a day), so we’re pretty proud that we were able to expose ourselves to so many people at one time.

Unfortunately, we’re unable to link to the “New Blog” post as all record of the conversation (and westseattlefunblog.com) was removed from the W$B Google index.

We’re not kidding when we say, “there’s a conspiracy”.

June 2009: The first official “everyone’s invited” WSFB Staff / Community Meeting takes place. Somewhere around 12-15 people showed up, including a couple W$B defectors.

Staff-only meetings had occurred since March 2009 and had been announced repeatedly to everyone in West Seattle via W$B, Facebook, and Yelp, but no one other than this guy ever bothered to show up.

These Thursday meetings continued the entire summer, without fail (06/11, 06/18, 06/25, 07/02, 07/09, 07/16, 07/23, 07/30, 08/06, 08/13, 08/20, and 08/27) and will continue until our dying blogbreath.

There were three BBQ events that took place – one each month – and each one saw the crowd grow. The last one on 08/27/09 saw nearly 50 people in attendance with folks coming not only from West Seattle but Federal Way, Vashon Island, and Renton.

In the true spirit of community, leftovers from the BBQ events are given to the folks that live on the street in the area surrounding Big Al’s in White Center.

At the end of June, we started a thread in the FunForum exposing private messages captured by W$B defectors. This exposure lead to W$B disabling the private messaging feature in their forums. Private messaging is disabled at W$B to this day.

July 2009: Independence Day, The West Seattle Street Fair, and the hottest day ever of all time occurred.

The second week of July brought the West Seattle Street Fair, and the WSFB was there for every minute except day 3, which was a Sunday and we never drink in public on Sundays.

The WSFB is believed to be the culprit behind several sticker-based “pranks”, including tagging one of the W$B iBooks with a hot pink WSFB sticker (while W$B non-breadwinner “Patrick” was sitting behind the keyboard).

Then, the end of July ushered in apocalyptic heat and devastation, and a different retrospective.

August 2009: August Rockfest 2009, Big Al’s anniversary, Luigi’s retirement, and a bowling team.

The WSFB continued the Thursday meetings and had a special night out at the Feedback Lounge for the first annual WSFB August Rockfest 2009. Approximately 20 funbloggers partied until the wee hours of the morning at West Seattle’s BEST rocker bar.

Big Al’s Brewing celebrated their one year anniversary with an outdoor concert featuring 3 Dead Whores , and WSFB was there.

During a darker moment, funblogger Luigilinguini went into retirement citing “exhaustion”, “over-drinking”, “excessive funmanship”, and the reality that he was on the verge of having two kids in high school.

Luigi returned to funblogging a mere one week later.

Also, the WSFB conducted pseudo-scientific research to determine the feasibility of forming a bowling team with outstanding results. We’re hoping to go head to head with a team from the non-fun blog!

By the end of August 2009 the WSFB garnered 98 friends on Facebook, most of whom we’ve met in person out in the community or at our gatherings.

Let’s take one last look at our accomplishments:

• We came from nothing, and continue to be nothing; no actual sponsors and no revenue stream.
• We’ve made lasting friendships with people from disparate and diverse social, academic, geographic, economic, and political backgrounds.
• We’ve injected thousands of dollars into the local economy with your involvement and participation in WSFB events.
• We’ve managed to get under the skin of the W$B by NOT GOING AWAY.
• We’ve accomplished unparalleled funmanship on an epic scale.

That’s our look back at the first ever WSFB Summer of Blog 2009. We’ve enjoyed meeting and cavorting with all you people and hope we can continue the cavorting well into the future.

Here’s to ALL OF YOU for being awesome

and excellent to each other!