My god. Have we really been at this for four years already?

It seems like just yesterday I was watching the countdown clock on our original domain name, theblastarea.com as we prepared to edit and put out our first magazine issue on 1/1/2007.

A lot has changed in that time. Not only has the magazine undergone four complete redesigns and an epic expansion, but the world around us has changed.

When Blast launched, “Twilight” was a popular new book, but nothing like the religion is has become today. in November 2006, as we prepared the issue, Harry Potter reigned supreme, and the first trailer for “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” was released.

The world was not yet in a period of economic recession. Housing prices were high, and it was easy to buy a home. Bush was president and Obama was a rookie senator from Illinois.

Iraq was the main war.

I gathered my friends to edit and produce articles and web-pages to go with them and we launched our 20-somethings magazine with no real idea what we were doing.

I’m still not a natural businessman, but I made one good decision: I shelled out my last $500 at the time to buy the domain name blastmagazine.com.

Broke and debt-ridden, the first year was great in terms of content and awful in terms of popularity, readership and money. BlastMagazine.com was de-indexed by Google when we bought it, because it was being used as a placeholder/advertising page with no real content. It took six months to gain and real popularity, and we weren’t on Google news for another year.

We had 25,000 pageviews in December 2007. Today we gain nearly that number per day.

We have several excellent blogs and a hold on the video game industry. We cover hard news, breaking news, soft news, feature news, music news, and porn news.

In 2010, I put the focus on geography. We expanded from Boston to New York, Miami, San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver and Dallas.

In 2011, Blast will focus on function. In the coming year, Blast Magazine will launch a recipes page, a job listing service, a classifieds page, an events calendar, and we will finally launch our online journalism stylebook, which we have been playing with since we launched the site.

Blast Recipes will feature dishes from Blast contributors and chefs, celebrities and restaurant owners from around our coverage zones and beyond. It is about 80 percent done, and you can see its development progress at recipes.blastmagazine.com.

Get a Job will be our own miniature version of Monster.com, but instead of millions of impossible to search listings, it will have screened job listings from employers who are specifically looking for college students, recent graduates, grad students, and Gen X-Y-Z applicants. I just have to design the logo. Check out getajob.blastmagazine.com to see how it’s going to look.

Bvents: The Blast Calendar will feature events, shows, and happenings from every Blast coverage area. We have a rough structure at events.blastmagazine.com for now, but we expect to launch this in the spring and it may look totally different.

The B-List will be our answer to Craigslist. Things have really gotten out of control with online classifieds. We hope to bring some sanity back into it. Expect that in the late winter.

The Blast Online Journalism Stylebook is online at style.blastmagazine.com, but we have a lot of design work left to do. We’re looking for a grammar nerd to help be the editor, so let me know if you’re interested.

And that’s how we’ll go.

It’s been a hell of a ride so far. Thank you for reading and continuing to make it such an amazing journey!

-john

Let me first apologize.

For about a year now, we’ve been using IX Web Hosting as an inexpensive solution to our very simple web hosting needs — three domains powered by WordPress. After all, we don’t have any key sponsors, and I fund Blast with my own money when it isn’t making its own cash.

It’s been a disaster. We are no longer using IX Web Hosting.

One of the last straws came when one of their technical support agents reminded me how little we were paying for their services.

Yes, you do get what you pay for.

This week, we upgraded to a private server and a different SQL server. We will be on a virtual private SQL server in a few days, and there will be virtually no downtime while our new hosting provider plugs everything in.

IX Web Hosting subjected us to a SQL server was was down due to abuse nearly every day and that — as you all know — was extremely slow and often unresponsive, even when it wasn’t being abused.

Then we found out that some of the RSS feeds on BlastMagazineBlogs.com had been hacked — spam code and links inserted.

The unreliability, poor service, poor servers and poor security of IX Web Hosting forced me to decide to allocate much more money for a new server. Whatever. We’re producing a great product here, and I want it to succeed. This is a move we should have made on January 1, 2007, when we launched.

Though, if you want to sponsor us, that might make me feel better.

Massachusetts may finally have a chance passing a journalism shield law.

California and 29 other states already have one, but that hasn’t helped Josh Wolf, a video-blogging convergence journalist who videoed an anti-G8 demonstration in 2005 and has been jailed under federal regulations for refusing to turn over footage to the police. It is clear that state shield laws have had no effect on the Federal Government, which has used every excuse it can to jail, threaten or intimidate journalists—journalists who perform a vital and Constitutionally protected task in American society.

Thomas Jefferson said he would prefer to have newspapers without a government to a government without newspapers. Though the word newspapers has evolved over the years to radio, television and the Internet, the message should be no less clear, the founding fathers viewed journalism as a vital check on the government.

It is your job, as the reader, to stand by the media and not buy into the fear.

–

Meghan Gargan has been working to unveil the Internet lately. In our March feature, Affair of the mouse, we get a serious lesson in the seldom-discussed topic of affairs and the disappearing casual sex taboo. The Internet is challenging our inhibitions, and people are all too happy to let them fall.

I’m proud of this piece and the work that went into it.

So, be honest, you know you’ve sported a "kiss me I’m Irish" t-shirt on St. Patrick’s Day despite your Polish ancestry. Blast goes green and orange this month with our cover models, Maureen and Keriann who can wear the shirt and mean it.

But don’t get all leprechauns and shamrocks on me, because Kelly Bodami and The Bitter Irishman, Dan Price explain what’s what in Irish culture.

We also dropped everything and hit Vegas this month to see what Sony’s got up its sleeve lately. Check out "Tech" for more on that.

That’s Blast for now. Stay tuned.