I don't know about you, but my loins are fully girded for the inevitable onslaught of end of the year awards, retrospectives, Top N lists, and so on. Such awards are already showing up while others promise to soon.

I'm not one for award-giving, but it happens that January 1 will be my First Official Blog Anniversary. Couple that with the import and publishing of that last of my Blogspot archives, from February and January (still a work in progress), and I'm at least somewhat in the mood for looking back at The Year That Was. I hope you'll indulge me as I do a few posts between now and Jan 1 on this topic.

The first thing I'd like to do is to salute the blogs that have been on my blogroll continuously since I started. They are as follows:

Ain't No Bad Dude
Coffee Corner *, my blogfather
Page Fault Interrupt *
Amish Tech Support *
Garden Spot *
Rick Jones *
Karin Kross *
Little Green Footballs
Mark Evanier
Matt Welch
Matthew Yglesias, who should be pleased to note that I alphabetize by first name
Michael Croft *
Oliver Willis
Quasipundit
War Liberal
Josh Marshall
Virginia Postrel

The ones with an asterisk are people I knew in Real Life first. The others were on just about all the other blogrolls that I encountered at the time. That's 17 out of 105 total blogs on my blogroll, so obviously there's quite a few excellent blogs that didn't exist a year ago or didn't come to my attention until a bit later. Sadly, there are also some excellent blogs that are no longer with us.

I'll have more to say about my first year of blogging in the coming days.