History of “The Block Brothers”- All Good Things Must Come to an End (365/365)

Hello world. Sorry again for the delayed post, but there just wasn’t anytime to write it yesterday. Let’s jump right back into it though.

Today we have another Back in Time post for you. This post will be about the final quarter of the year (the past 3 months). We will start out with October, which was our greatest month of all time.

Note: Tyler and I are writing these posts together. However, in this post and future posts, there are times when we will be talking about our individual opinions/experiences. To attempt to avoid confusion, we are using different color font at these moments.

Jonah- Red
Tyler- Blue

OCTOBER-

Again, there were no major developments during this month at college, but as I said, October was our greatest month of all time.

First of all, we started our new posting schedule, which was one of the best things we ever did. There were some advantages to making random posts all the time, such as not being restricted to making a post on a certain day. But it also brought some order to the blog and forced us to make more diverse posts, instead of just having Featured Pictures all the time.

Secondly, we finally purchased our own server. This was a lot better than running servers on our own computers since they generally couldn’t handle it.

Now let me just say this now, because it must be said eventually. We were planning on releasing the server to the public, but it is a lot of work. It’s a lot of work to set up, find plugins, maintain the server, keep people in line, etc. It takes a lot of time that we don’t have. So we will not be releasing the server at this time. We apologize for this. It may happen one day, but not now.

Thirdly, we had another great post in October. On October 26th, we had our 300th post. We decided to try something a bit different, and tell a fictional story about how our characters (SunBurntIcarus and Batman) met in Minecraft. It turned out to be a truly great post and it easily one of our all-time favorites.

Finally, our views were through the roof. We averaged an amazing 603 views per day. In addition, we got a record of 1,174 views on October 26th. Tyler’s ever popular Featured Pictures: Cool Minecraft Creations post got 427 views, while our co-op post “Minecraft 1.4.2…The Pretty Scary Update” got 374 views.

We had hoped to one day get 1,000 views, and it happened. It was absolutely glorious. It hasn’t happened since, but maybe another day.

That’s about all there is to say for October. Let’s see what happened in November.

NOVEMBER-

November originally seemed to be October- Part 2. Our views were consistent with October, until about half way into November.

Half way into the month, views started to fall…fast. We found this to be rather strange, and perhaps we were a tad bit disappointed. However, we were still getting views that we would have been ecstatic about back in July or August. Plus, for the last couple months, the Cool Minecraft Creations post had been taking most of the views, which also completely baffled us.

Anyway, we ended up averaging 445 views per day in November, which is amazing, but the last half of the month was spent in the 100s.

There was no major post news, except for the fact that we started a new series. In November we started a Creative build series.

They only other thing is that in November we were starting to grow tired of school and the blog, and we were anxiously looking forward to December when school would end and so would the 365.

Once, when I was feeling overwhelmed by the blog and wanted to quit, Riley told me that we were doing something that a lot of other people aren’t able to do. That inspired me to keep on going. Besides, we were so close to finishing that it would be stupid to quit.

So let’s talk about December, shall we?

DECEMBER-

And here we are. We’ve looked at every month this year in an in-depth review session, and now we’ve made it to December…to today.

December has been…interesting.

The first week of December was rather dull, but once we made it to Week 2, things got more interesting. Our LOST series had finally ended after 11 months. “Finals week” was pulverizing both of us. And we finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel.

Mustering up whatever strength we had left, we wrote posts, knowing that it would be over soon.

We didn’t really have any different posts this month though (besides these ones). We did start a new Desert Survival series, but nothing else.

Our average in December currently stands at 165, which is slightly higher than we had in the last half of November.

Despite the fact that views are lower than they were a few months ago, they are still fairly high.

That’s about all there is for December.

We said that we would also have our Favorites post today, but we are going to delay that until tomorrow.

Tomorrow, we will have our grand finale.

Thanks for reading and Happy Mining!

History of “The Block Brothers”- Beginnings (360/365)

Welcome to the final days. 12 months ago, Tyler and I started a blog. In this special post series, I am going to show you the full history of the blog. Hold on to something, we’re going to go back in time.

Tyler was going to help write this post, but was unable to due to other arrangements. I’m thinking that he will be around to help write the other posts though.

There will be 5 posts in this series. For the penultimate post, Tyler and I will take a look back at some of our all-time favorite posts. The final post on New Year’s Eve will be a complete reflection on the 365 project, and a look into the future of the blog. Let’s begin with today’s post.

It’s difficult to know where to begin exactly. I suppose I shall begin back at my old blog, Year of Lasts.

NOVEMBER 2011-

At this time, I had my personal blog, Year of Lasts, for approximately 3 months. It was never very successful, as a result of my boring life and infrequent writing schedule. Needless to say, I didn’t care much about it. One day, I was talking to Tyler at school, and the conversation moved to Minecraft. I had played it before, but only the Classic version. Mixed with Tyler telling me how great the premium version is, and watching tons of Yogscast videos, I decided to get the game.

On November 9th, I purchased the game and started building. I decided to start work on a man-made island and I was going to publish some posts on my blog. I had fun with them, but eventually I stopped making posts, and stopped playing Minecraft. School was getting to me, and balancing Minecraft and school didn’t work, so I had to cut out Minecraft.

DECEMBER 23, 2011-

Tyler was pushing me to make another post about my island on my blog, so I got back to work. While working on the post, Tyler proposed the idea of working together. He could test out mods, send me the pictures, and I would write the post. Then I had an idea, an idea which would change the way we spent our free time more than we imagined.

I proposed the idea of making a completely new blog and have it be strictly about Minecraft. We would both be writers, and would make posts whenever we had time. We could write about mods, maps, everything. Tyler liked the idea, and I told him I would work on the site in a few days.

DECEMBER 24, 2011, CHRISTMAS EVE-

By the way, a few days means a few hours in this case. I was bored and overly excited by this idea of a Minecraft blog, so I wasted no time in getting started. Also, there is no reason why the blog was started on Christmas Eve, just a coincidence. Anyways, Tyler and I started on the design and we also started throwing out ideas for possible posts. After we had a tentative design for our blog, we started on the posts, 3 of them. This was the beginning of something big.

DECEMBER 25, 2011, CHRISTMAS DAY-

Somehow we got our first follower on this day. This resulted in a huge morale boost for Tyler and me. We wrote more posts, developed the blog a bit more, but not much else happened on this day.

DECEMBER 26, 2011-

Day 3 of the blog, and we were already grabbing the attention of people. Someone from TheGameGuide, a videogame blog which was removed quite a while ago, contacted us asking if we would like to write for his blog. Surprised by this turn of events, we accepted the offer. We would write for them on Minecraft Monday for a few months, but we eventually stopped, and their blog eventually died. Despite all that had happened in these three days, the most crucial moment of the blog’s history came two days later.

DECEMBER 28, 2011-

I saw a post by the WordPress team where they were talking about 365 projects. I knew what they were, I had heard of them before, but I hadn’t considered the possibility…until now.

I asked Tyler what he thought about trying a 365 project. We both knew it would be a lot of work, but we decided to give it a try anyway.

This moment, a simple idea, changed the way both of us lived out our day-to-day lives for the next 12 months. I will be the first to admit, there have been times when I regretted coming up with the 365 idea, in March especially. We’ll talk all about March tomorrow though.

In the long run though, it turned out well. And based on the blog’s success, I wouldn’t take it back.

We won’t do this again though, I guarantee that, at least not while we’re in college anyway.

After the 28th of December, nothing monumental happened with the blog. More views, and some more followers (I think), but nothing too exciting. With that said, that will wrap up today’s special post. Stay tuned tomorrow for another special post. Tomorrow’s special post will be about the first quarter (January-March).

Thanks for reading and Happy Mining!