New Year is traditionally a time to review the past and make new beginnings. Thus I will take advantage of it to highlight some new stuff on the blog as well as well as to summarize some of the last year’s events.

What’s new ?

As promised last year, the blog will start new year with new look. The light blue background is what you readers voted for of the available alternatives in last years competition.

As regular readers will notice, the site has received two brand new sections: My collection and Stamp Exchange.

Stamp exchange is a revamped version of the “cover exchange” feature I did last year in blog. Exchanging covers and postcards with nice stamps on top was lot of fun. But it’s simply time to try something different … What I have come up is a mixture of traditional stamp exchange mixed with “experimental” stuff. The output will hopefully be FUN, EASY AND INEXPENSIVE way to exchange those unnecessary duplicates to something more useful.

Web based My Collection is something I’ve dreamed of for years. This first version is simply a listing of countries and number of stamps I have from them. But I have high hopes for making it “much more” over the next few years.

In addition there are lots of smaller changes that hopefully make this blog a whole lot better.

So what was 2009 like..?

When I started the blog in early 2009, I didn’t have any great plans for it. It was kind of a diary, a possibility to share some of my “philatelic views” with rest of the world and share opinions with other collectors. As such, I like to keep in future as well… With 215 written entries I seem to have a lot say and based on number of comments (roughly 500 of them) they raise opinions as well. My thanks to everyone who has took part on the discussions.

One of the decisions I made early on was keeping my private life outside the blogs scope. It’s a decision I haven’t regretted as 2009 was the hardest year I have never encountered (In short: I got severely ill followed by a diagnosis of severe but treatable chronic disease). I admit that playing with my stamp collection and writing many of the entries has been more than good therapy.

I’m very grateful for the new friendships blog has made possible.

In terms of figures, last year with the blog was more than I hoped for:

• The blog had slightly over 24,000 readers from 145 countries (most readers coming from US or UK)
• There was over 70,000 pageviews
• The newsletter has now more than 100 subscribers
• The blog received couple of awards / nominations for “best stamp blog”
• The covers exchange brought me weekly greetings around the world.

Thank You all for making this possible.

A happy new year 2010!!!

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