Today is the 10 year anniversary of Sixteen Small Stones.

The volume and frequency of my posts here has never been great, and I do not have a large, active community of commenters, but I hope that my small contribution has had a positive influence on those who have read my thoughts here and that what I have lacked in volume I have made up for in quality and clarity.

When I started Sixteen Small Stones, MySpace was a promising new website offering a new social web experience, Facebook was exclusively for college and high school students. YouTube was less than a year old and still in beta. Google Maps was brand new. Windows XP was still the most current operating system from Microsoft. And Twitter, iPhones, iPads, Kindle e-Readers, and Netflix didn’t even exist yet.

LOST had just started its 2nd season and the Doctor Who reboot had finished its 1st season. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince had just been published and the seventh Harry Potter book was still years away and didn’t have a name yet. Recent blockbuster movies included Star Wars III – Revenge of the Sith, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Batman Begins. People were gearing up for the Holiday release of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.

President Gordon B. Hinckley was still the prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Hurricane Katrina had just devastated New Orleans a couple of months before I posted the first article. Thanks to the rising power of blogs, CBS News anchor Dan Rather had been forced into retirement earlier in the year in the wake of the Rathergate scandal. Pope John Paul II had passed away and Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI. Iraq was holding it’s first democratic elections.

Yes, a lot has changed in 10 years. I have had a lot of projects and plans that have not worked out the way I had hoped. But here I am still writing.

Thank you to everyone who has read my blog, supported me, encouraged me, and shared my posts during the last decade!

– J. Max Wilson