Corn Nation Turns 10! - Happy Birthday To Us!

Corn Nation is officially 10 years old today!

There was a lot more I wanted to write about because it's been a fun 10 years and we’ve produced a lot of content. Unfortunately, what I want to do and what I actually accomplish are two separate things these days, so I’ve taken a few things I wanted to mention and condensed them into this post.

I wanted to mention was the Countdown To Joining The Big Ten series we did, which you can find by entering the following into a google search: site:cornnation.com big ten countdown. There’s enough in that series to publish a book on the subject.

I wanted to write a bit about the yearbook we did from that started in 2008 and was published by Maple Street Press. I was exceptionally proud of the yearbook, because it held us to a high standard - it was print, followed established publishing standards and styles, and (maybe most of all) required that we use absolutely no profanity.

It required a fresh look at Nebraska football, and came out in competition with others who are already established. Unfortunately, just as we were making headway (getting popular), Maple Street press went out of business and our last edition was in 2011.

There were a lot of people who wrote for the yearbook, constituting a mix of bloggers and professional journalists. Writers included Brandon Vogel, Chris Brown, Brandon Cavanaugh, Steve Sipple, Brian Christopherson, Mark Fricke, Mark Coddington, Tad Stryker, Husker Mike, and Matt Hinton.

I have thought about creating a “for print” year book since then, but at this point it's probably not something that's going to happen unless I’d somehow manage to turn this into a full-time job and that’s going to be extremely difficult.

There have been a lot of people over the years who have contributed to Corn Nation. (Please forgive me if I forgot you, my memory sucks as of late.)

Husker Mike started with me at the beginning of 2007. Brian Towle has done a massive amount of work since he started in 2013. David McGee has been our photographer since October of 2012.

Adam Furley, Andy Ketterson, Brian Towle, Cheeseandcorn, David McGee, Dennis Hubbard, Jlew, Joe Canale, Mike Canale, Ryan Tweedy (Cobcast Ryan) Keith Yaple, Michael Snow, Derek Hernandez, Mister Mike, Nathaniel Perlow, Pat Jannsen, Patrick Gerhart, Paul Dalen, Salt Creek and Stadium, Ty Peteranetz, Will Grub, Jake Sorensen, ranchbabe, and thehooch.

That’s a fair amount of contributors over the years, and we have a pretty decent-sized army in play right now. I’m pretty happy with the coverage and what we’re doing, but we are always looking for good people to join us. (Good as in “contribute to discourse and content”, not Good as in “angelic”. Do I even have to say that?)

Every year about this time of year I think about quitting. The off-season seems to drag on so long, and just about the time I think I’ve had it, football season starts up again to give me hope. I'm still not 100% I am hoping that changes over the next year. We'll see.

Corn Nation has grown quite a bit from its early days.

In July we had 325,318 vists with 204,307 uniques. Those are exact numbers from our crappiest month of the year. You don't get exact numbers from websites very often. Mostly what you get are descriptions that say “in the tens of thousands” or “millions of hits per month”. That's how you can determine bullshit from reality.

What’s going to make us grow more?

You.

You need to have more sex. Produce more babies, Nebraskans. Grow your population, teach them to come and read Corn Nation, make more strong walk-ons for the Husker teams and tough, strong women for the volleyball, basketball, track, softball, and soccer teams.

If you just want the sex and no babies, well, then you should tell more people about us and how great we are.

Now get out there and get to work. The season is starting soon, sunsabitches. I expect to see you all here when it does.