Ten Glorious Years

Well, here we are, ten years to the day since I first put The Sleaze online. And what a bloody miserable anniversary it is turning out to be - traffic is still hitting rock bottom (and has been since the beginning of the year - it took a further nosedive at the start of February and has never recovered), and the official tenth anniversary story has been all but ignored by readers. All par for the course for the past couple of years. On what should be a day of me celebrating what is quite an achievement - keeping any website active for more than a few months these days seems miraculous - I instead find myself wondering even more than usual why I even bother. Others have already given up. The Daily Redundancy has apparently shut up shop after three years, (as the site is down, I'm assuming the announcement isn't an April Fool's joke). If their traffic has been anything like mine of late, then I don't blame them. It really is dispiriting, putting in the effort, only to see it completely ignored. It's like being Tim Westwood doing the afternoon shift on Radio One Extra.

Anyway, getting back to this tenth anniversary issue of The Sleaze, I'm quite proud of the latest story - Christ the Kink? - even if nobody else seems to be interested. It was a relatively last minute choice, replacing the planned story which, I decided, just wasn't offensive enough. The resulting story is a throwback to the good old days of the site - it was conceived and written quickly, with a minimum of editing. Whilst giving it a rough and ready feel, this process also lends the story a certain feeling of immediacy, I think. I rather miss the days when most of the stuff I produced for The Sleaze was written 'on-the-fly' like this. It was still fun back then. The web was still young and a novelty to us all - website owners and surfers alike. Everything online seemed ephemeral and disposable then. Indeed, I didn't think The Sleaze would last past ten issues, when, I calculated, I'd run out of material. Then I revised this to three years, then five, then ten. Well, I've reached ten now, so I'm not sure what the next target will be. I've still got plenty of story ideas, whether anyone wants to read them, or whether The Sleaze is the best platform for them, is another question.