Happy birthday to Shoot Up, happy birthday to us!

Dimly through the mists of time and clouds of alcohol-induced memory loss I can cast my mind back and just recall that heady day back in 2009 when I published the first article on your soaraway Shoot Up. Uhm, urr, it was on 1st April. Yes, that’s right, Shoot Up is two years old today. So happy birthday us!

I started Shoot Up on 1st April 2009 after becoming jealous of the success of my wife’s blog over at stripykat.com. If she could do it, so could I! So I started off by reviewing blood glucose meters, as at the time no one seemed to give them much thought. My first review of the Wavesense Jazz seemed to go down quite well (sadly the original comments on the post were lost during the Great Database Meltdown of 2010) and so I carried on, moving on to spouting ill-informed and poorly researched rubbish about diabetes.

A chance encounter in the comments section of someone else’s blog led to me meeting my now esteemed co-writer Alison. Alison had toyed with the idea of blogging but didn’t really have technical interest to set one up and I liked the idea of having someone with considerably more experience of diabetes than me writing on the blog. This combination of geekery and experience was a serendipitous one and one that has continued to flourish.

We then encouraged guest bloggers and have been lucky enough to have some brilliant different perspectives from people like Katie, Simon, Annette, Stephen, Samantha, Mark, Shelley, Tom, Sam & Terry, which has added a great deal of value to the blog and given you all a break from our rubbish.

But, of course, the greatest contribution has been from you – our dear readers – without your comments, humour, encouragement and interest (even from you lurkers who read and never comment!) we both would have packed up and given up long ago. Writing nearly 300 articles about type one diabetes ain’t easy but with your help we’ve done it and will, hopefully, continue to do so.

So what have we achieved over the last two years? I hope we’ve been at least slightly entertaining; I hope we’ve approached diabetes in a positive light; I hope we’ve raised a little bit of awareness about living with diabetes (nothing gives me greater pleasure than non-diabetics reading the blog); I hope we’ve encouraged people to question their health care providers.

But one thing I do know for certain is that we’ve definitely created a positive and happy little community on our wee corner of the web and that’s certainly something worth celebrating!