Cheapseateats.com turns 1000 or almost 4, depending on your count

By Iron Chef Leftovers

According to the blog stats, this will be post #1000 for CSE. Coincidentally, it took us almost exactly 4 years to reach that number – our first post was on February 18^th, 2010 when AJ Coltrane (who was then just known as Coltrane) posted about the NBA Celebrity All-Star game. Blaidd Drwg then followed it up the next day with a sappy post about retiring baseball players. My first post was a few days later about a controversy in Italy over eating cat (and I still see no reason why they are not a viable protein source). Coltrane’s famous pizza posts began with his base dough recipe on March 11^th. Our first comment was posted by loyal reader Junior Joey Jo-Jo Shabadu (somehow I don’t think that is his real name) to Coltrane’s first post on February 19^th.

For those of you who were not with us in the beginning days of the blog, the early posts were mildly entertaining and full of charts and graphs, mostly about sports, some about food and rarely about games (our first games post was June 26^th, 2010), posted sporadically over the first few months, maybe one or two a week. I am pretty sure the first few months the only people reading the blog were the writers and a handful of people who were married to/related to the writers. There were emails between the writers when we would see comments from people we didn’t recognize trying to figure out who we told about the blog and celebrating that someone new was actually reading our stuff.

We had a few hiccups along the way – who will ever forget the failed WordPress update we had in January of 2013 that crashed the site and led to a frantic call from Coltrane and me spending a couple of hours getting the site back up (we still don’t have any pre-2012 pictures on the site – I should get around to that at some point) without losing any content. There were a few posts that my computer crashed on before I ever saved them and there are the spelling errors which drive Mrs. Iron Chfe nuts (I did that for your Mrs. Iron Chef).

The blog has grown since then in term of quality, quantity, scope and readership. I started posting my beer reviews mostly because I wanted someplace that I could reference them easily and not be completely screwed if I lost my notebook. That had the added side benefit of bringing in a bunch of new readers. Coltrane started urban gardening in earthboxes and his lessons and pictures brought in all sorts of folks doing the same thing. Both Coltrane and I have become better cooks and it shows in what we are posting. Coltrane and Blaidd Drwg have become more analytical about sports and make some pretty rock solid cases for what they are writing about. There are now posts almost daily (granted most of those are from the horrible backlog of beer notes I have), but I would also like to think that we have become better writers because of it.

Despite my usual sarcasm, snark and general obscure sense of humor, I would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to all of our readers, whether you started reading us at the beginning or just found us last week. We write on this blog to entertain ourselves and I would have never guessed that I would still be doing that 4 years later. Hopefully you find our blog as useful, entertaining and informative as we do. If you are a regular reader (or even an irregular reader), feel free to leave a comment or drop us a line on Facebook, and tell us how you found us – it is still exciting for us when we find out we have picked up a new reader.

Until our next 1000 posts (or my next post, whichever comes first), this is Iron Chef Leftovers signing off and to quote the immortal writing of the great Bartholomew Jo-Jo Simpson: