Hi all, I hope you enjoyed reading the spotlight on user Blx. If you haven't read it yet, you can read Blx's spotlight interview here.

Anyway, on to today's blog post.

Sleepycomics.com is now 6 years old!

Six years ago, I was a 19 year old kid who was headed off to college, with no idea what was ahead. Six years ago I was just beginning to recognize and embrace my sleepy fetish. Six years ago, I started Sleepycomics.com. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined being here today. Collecting over 22,000 images, operating a website with over a million page views per month, and even becoming an artist.

I know I sometimes come across as a braggart, but I am just going to go ahead and say it: I truly think Sleepycomics.com is the best sleepy fetish website ever made. The quality of content, the organization of the data, the timeliness of updates...if I was just a regular user, I'd be amazed. If I was still that 19 year old kid with a sleepy fetish, I'd be so happy if Sleepycomics.com existed back then.

It wasn't always like this. When I started six years ago, I was hosting a Blogspot blog on Tripod.com. My database had maybe 200 things in it, and it was updated in Microsoft Word. That's right. I made a table in Microsoft Word, saved it as HTML, and posted it every time I had to make an update. Since then, the technology I developed to power Sleepycomics.com has improved tenfold. There's really nothing like it out there, which is why Sleepycomics.com is so unique.
Throughout the years I kept changing the layout, trying new things. I finally settled on the "Sleepycomics.com Express" layout, which is what you use today.
I treat Sleepycomics.com like an entrepreneurial endeavor. I am always asking myself, "how can I do this better?" And when I think of a solution, I do my best to implement it.

In those six years, I got better at finding new content. You see, when I was little, I used to love collecting things. I collected coins, stamps, rocks. I liked cataloging things and collecting data. I was a very analytically inclined nerd. I remember going to my local bank and getting rolls upon rolls of pennies. I'd search through the pennies one by one, looking for 'Wheaties', foreign coins or anything odd. Sleepycomics.com is kind of like that. Instead of coins though, I collect and catalog sleepy scenes.
Coin collecting is a zero-sum game however. If I have the coin, no one else can have it. With sleepy scenes, once I find it, the whole world can have it.

As time went on, I developed various strategies for finding new sleepy content. At first, I just did Google searches for things like "chloroform comics", and that turned up some interesting stuff. If you search that same thing today, you basically get my website! I read comic book summaries, looking for keywords like "knocked out" and "unconscious". More recently, I started doing brute force searches, where I'd plow through an entire series. I've seen a lot of interesting stuff as a result. I can tell you all sorts of stuff I learned about comics...without ever having read a single one!

Six years have gone by, and I still can't thank you guys enough, the users of Sleepycomics.com. You guys showed me that I wasn't just some weird 19 year old kid with a sleepy fetish...there are other people just like me! I also want you guys to ask yourselves the same question I ask myself everyday: "How can we make Sleepycomics.com better?" We can always be better. Send your thoughts and ideas to [email protected]. I WILL respond!

Thinking about the past six years is fascinating. But the next six years? One can only dream!