Unlike most child geniuses, ShootUp 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 ShootUp 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 ShootUp 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 ShootUp 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

This image came up when I searched Wiki Commons for "lurking". I've no idea why but, hell, it'll do for pictorial filler.

Like the ruling party in some sort of Orwellian dystopian future, here at your soaraway Shoot Up we take a grim satisfaction in watching everything you do on the site.

Well, perhaps not quite, but we have noticed that the number people who read our posts and forums hugely exceed the number of people who comment. While we have a flourishing site and love and cherish our regulars (by “love” we mean “put up with” and by “cherish” we mean “tolerate”) it does seem there are a lot of lurkers out there.

Now, you’re more than welcome to lurk in the shadows if you want. However, we strongly suspect you have interesting experiences, useful input and other good stuff to contribute. So if you’ve teetered on the edge of setting up an account and commenting on an article or starting a thread in the forums but haven’t done so far – now’s your chance! You can create an account or even sign in using Facebook if you want – there are instructions here: http://www.shootuporputup.co.uk/resources/using-the-blog-and-forums/

Don’t worry if you think your diabetes control is rubbish or you haven’t the faintest clue what DAFNE is, or what the hell bolus / basal regimes are. We won’t shout at you or anything silly like that. I screw up my diabetes control all the time – my last BG reading was 12.9 – and I’m completely clueless with regard to most things about diabetes. People in glass houses, etc.

So if you fancy taking the plunge, then why not leave a comment below and say hello! I promise* to be nice.

* promise to be nice is not legally binding.