Wow! Can’t believe it’s been two years already!

Honestly, I never thought we’d come this far. That we’d have survived for two years, that we’d have a name for ourselves, that we’d have a growing readership in thousands (current feed subscriber headcount at 16k+). So thank you for that!

This time I thought I’d tell you a bit about the beginning, maybe even a little before the beginning. This was a time when no one understood what Twitter was (I had a little over 20 followers), and tech forums where we used to hang out. A few of us Mac users had formed our own little community in an Indian tech forum, and shared all kinds of interesting finds there. Sharing everything from news stories, interesting software, and heated discussions with Windows fanboys over how the Mac was better. Aayush and me thought we should take that and form a Mac blog instead, but the simple problem of a name held us back, and we abandoned project. Should we have come up with a name, we’d have probably abandoned it for other reasons. It was only months later, early June of 2008, when Ashwin suggested that we start a Mac blog, Aayush and myself immediately jumped to the idea, and roped Preshit in. Extremely long Gmail conversation threads followed.

The name was a problem again. All the good domains were taken, and the rest of them just didn’t sound right. We started off with macboys.in, since this was going to be a Mac blog for Indians (never thought you guys would be interested). We then came up with desiapples.com, appleofmyeyes.com, etc. Finally, it took my intellect to come up with the name smokingapples.com. Finally, on the 19th of June, smokingapples.com was ours.

Where we thought the name was our main issue, we didn’t realise how important it would be to get the design finished. We didn’t want an off the shelf WordPress theme, so it had to be built from scratch. At the time, I didn’t want the responsibility of being the site’s designer, so we got Aditya into the team. His busy schedules lead to more delays; weeks went by without any progress, we wrote some articles just to see how we fared. Finally, after getting a working site with a theme, Smoking Apples was launched on the 15th of August, the day of India’s independence.

That was two years ago. And here we are today. It has been a fun ride, and we don’t intend on stopping it any time soon. Thank you all.

Milind Alvares – Editor,
Preshit Deorukhkar – Head of Operations,
iXyr Media.

PS: Stay tuned for a smokin’ announcement later today.

Bokeh Stars image by 4otomax