This iteration of Sherlock Peoria, four years later . . .

Four years ago this summer, I shifted Sherlockian gears.

For the previous decade, I had been conglomerating Sherlockiana into a website at SherlockPeoria.net using mostly good old-fashioned HTML, a little PHP, and a thing or two otherwise. The four years prior hadn't been as robust, site-building-wise as the previous eight, which you can see in the difference between the 2002-2008 version of the site and the 2008-2012 version, both of which are still out there. The move I made in 2012, at the time, could be seen as an even further decline in my web ambitions, and some might even say, a further decline in my avocation as an active Sherlockian. 

But the reason for the change was simple: At heart, I am not a coder. Or a web guru. Or a graphic designer. (All of which can be seen by simply looking at the site.) I am a writer. Writing about Sherlock Holmes is what I do, for better or worse.

So, with some regrets, some feelings of personal failure, I abandoned site-building (and perhaps, poor Don, my blogging partner at the old site) for this Blogger outpost a month later. Prior to that, I'd put something together to post to the web every Sunday night. Once a week, and boy, some of those Sunday nights were tough. Blogging on Blogger offered the ease of whenever-I-felt-like-it posting, and the pressure was off.

No schedule. No routine. Just Sherlocking when the spirit called.

And how did that work out?

Well, after my first ten years of blogging every week on the old site, I had, at most, five hundred and twenty weekly posts.

This month, after four years of blogging when the Sherlock calls? By the end of next month, Sherlock Peoria Blogger-style will hit its thousandth new post.

It's not just the venue . . . from 2002 to almost 2010, things were different. Sherlock Holmes was not a major media darling. In the early half of that period, he actually have seemed like he might be waning.

And then, in the last week before 2010, an actual major motion picture hit called simply Sherlock Holmes made it to theaters. Seven months later, the BBC aired an even more simply named television show, Sherlock. And things started to get interesting.

American television tried to get in on the party. Sherlock Holmes conventions started up all over the world. More fan writings about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson appeared than in the entire previous century. Things got very interesting.

I haven't been blogging at a rate over two times faster simply because I wasn't messing around with HTML or Photoshopping pictures to web-worthy sizes, as I was with the previous version of Sherlock Peoria. I've been blogging so much more because there is just so much more to blog about.

And we're not done yet.

Not sure what my thousandth post is going to be, but I'm looking forward to it. These days, it could be any of all sorts of things . . . and that's a very happy thought.