Unlike most child geniuses, Shoot Up is unique in that it’s parents met only once it had been born. How modern. Tim created the monster and Alison joined him in the early days to help tame it.
The wonder of virtual cakes is that they’re carb free. We can think of no other benefits to them.
Soaraway Shoot Up got off to a flying start with Tim and Alison sharing pretty much every diabetes anecdote they knew via the medium of the interweb. They also tried to publish some useful stuff too, mostly sharing information around pumps and how to get them, continuous glucose monitoring and the banality of living with diabetes with a largely bewildered world. They were hugely excited when they held the first ShootUp meet up and two things happened – people turned up, and they weren’t weird. Who’d have thought it.
ShootUp’s next step was to branch out with a forum. Some say this was because Tim and Alison were too lazy to keep creating all the content themselves and wanted readers to share some of the load. Others mumble something about the value of sharing experiences and knowledge in a well-informed yet humorous environment. We couldn’t possibly comment.
We also wrote about plenty of diabetes stuff that year too.
As Shoot Up entered the toddler world of the terrible twos it was named as the number one diabetes blog in the UK, an accolade we chose to accept without delving too deeply into the level of judgement applied in the decision making process.
This lead to a huge uplift in the volume of press releases coming in to the blog, asking us to write about all manner of diabetes related tat which we mostly ignore. The side benefit of this was the creation of arguably one of the most entertaining pages on the blog – our guidelines for PR agencies.
We wrote about more even more diabetes stuff that year too.
And now Shoot Up is three. We’ve come a long way and never cease to be amazed by the number of hangers-on we’ve acquired en route. The fact that people read this stuff does astonish us both quite regularly. But it also keeps us churning out the content and meddling with the damned site to make it easy to use. Thanks to all of you who share your comments, post in the forums, or even quietly lurk in the background (go on, come out of the shadows and wish us happy birthday, we dare you).
As we head into our fourth year we do of course have top secret plans in place to make this the year where we finally achieve global domination. But in case they don’t quite come off, we’ll continue our little sideline in writing a blog where the diabetes is the star, where people won’t be derided for having a “bad” HbA1c result, and where humour comes second only to insulin in terms of essential diabetes medication.
Thanks for all your support
Alison & Tim
Hurrah! Happy birthday to Shoot Up – it’s already lasted two years longer than I thought it would! 😉
Yay! Congrats @tim & @alison
Here’s to another year of rotting toes and comatose!
Excellent. Happy Birthday!
Now you’ve got past the terrible twos I’m expecting lots more tantrums and the beginnings of an attitude that answers back and starts to question everything with “But why?”. Oh, are we doing that already.
Hurrah!!
But why?
Buy why?
Just BECAUSE!
That’s not fair. Humpf
Many happy returns, let’s turn the abba party album to 11.
To enthuse you to carry on posting till the 4th anniversary, I woke with a blood sugar of 17 having gone to bed at 5, I’m now adding cous cous to my list of problematic foods I haven’t got to grips yet with on the pump
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you dear Soaraway Shootup
Happy birthday to you
(PS I have come out of the closet once before and I thought this was a worthy second occasion)
Hurrah, glad to have dragged you out into the daylight once more.
Happy Birthday!!
I usually just lurk as I am the mother of a teenager with Diabetes, but you’re right, I just had to step into the light for a moment to wish you well.
Thanks for the information and the humour – it all helps 🙂
I think if I was the mother of a diabetic teenager I wouldn’t have the energy to comment very often either 😉 Thanks for coming out of the darkness for a little while though.
Happy Birthday Shoot Up.
Thanks for keeping me entertained through my days as a lurker and since coming out into the light.
I had a blood sugar of 3 this morning to join in with your celebrations.
If anyone’s interested, these comments on Wil’s blog document the first time Tim and Alison encountered each other online:
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=19200976&postID=7650089079319206814
The sparkling wit and chemistry was there right from the off I see 😀