10 Years of Card Boarded

Today marks the 10th anniversary of my first post here on Card Boarded. Back in 2009 when I started this thing I never would've thought I'd make it this far. Blogging was kind of a foreign concept to me at the time and I really wasn't even sure what I was doing in the beginning. Now its become one of my favorite parts of collecting hockey cards.

Ten years and over 750 posts later, I feel like blogging has really helped boost my collection and kept me interested in the hobby. One of the best parts has been checking out all the other great hockey and sports card blogs I've found through doing this.

In order to mark this special occasion, I thought it would be fun to design a special edition header. It definitely resembles the current header that's been live for years now, but there are some obvious changes, the biggest being a departure from the regular color palette.

Another thing that sounded fun for the occasion was taking a look at some of the numbers related to the posts I've made on here. I use Excel quite a bit for work and really enjoy making tables and charts for this kind of stuff, so I decided to throw a few things together.

Here is a cool little chart showing the numbers of posts I've made each year. As you can see I was quite busy on here back in 2010-12. The biggest reason for that: I was still single and lived in an apartment so I had a lot more free time for collecting and blogging.

My wife and I were married in 2012 and our first child was born in 2013, which actually corresponds surprisingly well with the nosedive in the total number of posts beyond 2013. Having a family and a house definitely took away some of the free time I would use for blogging. Even through everything going on, I still tried to find time when I could. With the exception of 2018, my number of posts has been trending upwards, so that's cool.

Looking back over ten years worth of posts on here has definitely been interesting. While I have stuck to several primary collection projects over the years (e.g. Jimmy Howard, Super Scripts, etc), there are actually quite a few different topics I've covered.

Below is a chart that breaks down the proportions of the most frequent topics I've posted. These are the top ten according to total number of posts for a specific topic. I'm definitely not surprised that my main player collection takes the top spot.

Lastly, I thought it would be neat to see how my two main collection projects, the Super Scripts and Jimmy Howard, have progressed over the past ten years. The exact numbers might be a little off just because I determine them based on simply scrolling back through my posts on here and counting the number of new cards in chronological order.

With the exception of close to 90 Jimmy Howard cards back in 2011, things have been fairly consistent from year to year with these two projects. While it may not seem like all that much being around 20 cards per year, at least its something to keep each project going after all this time. Hopefully I can keep this up moving forward.

I want to say thank you to everyone who has stopped by over the last ten years. I still think its pretty cool that even a few people like to check out what I have going on here.

Most of you have your own blogs that I really enjoy reading. For those of you that do, keep up the great work. For anyone that does not have one, I highly recommend it. I feel like blogging has been one of the keys to my enjoyment of this hobby for the last ten years.

I would also like to give a special shout out to Brett from My Hockey Card Obsession. It was reading his great blog back in 2009 that actually inspired me to start my own. If I hadn't stumbled upon it from an old Puck Daddy post on Yahoo back in the day, who knows if I even would've started this whole thing. Definitely glad I did.

Here's to another ten years of blogging, hopefully...