It’s been neat this week looking back at the past ten years of IMAO. It’s a lot of posts, and it was cool to see some Harvey found of mine that could have been written by someone else for all I remember of them. But this all really makes me wish I had more time for blogging to do some new more elaborate posts. I’ve had to give up blogging time for other writing projects as I’m trying to make my name as a columnist and I’m still working on my long time goal of being a novelist (back in 2005 I wrote a story, “Superego”, piece by piece on my blog and I’ve since rewritten it from scratch into a full novel; SarahK is helping me edit it and I’m about 60,000 words into another novel I’m working on). But there is certain kinds of funny that can only be done as blog posts and it needs to be done. In the very least, I need to make time for some more Frank the Artist (old archive here, new archive here), as that was some pretty funny stuff. And I wish I had time for more podcasts; I loved working on those with SarahK who is probably the most talented comedic actor of the group. We’ve been talking about doing our own RiffTrax of a movie for some time; maybe one day we’ll get time.

Well, who knows what the future will hold for me and for the blog IMAO. Well, on September 4th HarperCollins will be publishing my next book which will sort of be the magnum opus of my years of blogging. Here’s the preliminary cover for it:

In it, I will give my solutions to all of America’s problems. Interestingly, Obama isn’t mentioned once (other than the title of my previous book) because it’s a forward looking book about American greatness, so he didn’t really fit in it.

Anyway, I want to thank all my readers old and new for coming here and giving me your time. This blog has already given me so much, and I hope to continue to keep an entertaining stop for you all far into the future. And maybe make it a source for rebel news when the apes or the robots take over.

Year by year, some of the great posts in IMAO history:
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2002 – 6 suggestions for executing Osama bin Laden. Surprisingly, none of them include dumping his rotting corpse into the ocean.

2003 – Know Thy Enemy: Liberals – Still relevant today. Oddly, even that line about Gitmo.

2004 – The first editorial ever posted to the internet: “We Should Target More Civilians”

2005 – Aquaman joins IMAO – “Don’t Tap on the Glass”

2006 – Scary Evil Monkey!

2007 – I think this was where I first started getting the hang of Newsish Fakery posts: “America’s 2007 Corn Crop a ‘Failure’, Top Democrats Tell Bush”

2008 – This one’s dedicated to all the “professional comedy writers” who still to this very day in 2012 claim that it’s impossible to find anything funny to write about Obama.

2009 – Anyone remember the Climategate email scandal?

2010 – Some of Mr. Right’s best Photoshoppery, right here: Classic Halloween Horror Shows

2011 – How to insult a Muslim.

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Gotta say I really hated doing these posts, since I kept losing focus and drifting through the archives like Tom Hanks on a raft in the Pacific.

WILSON!

PS: The entire “Frank the Artist” category. Those stick figure drawings just make me giggle like a lunatic.

[via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine]

It was changed in 2003, after soliciting suggestions from the readership.

Looking back on the ten years of IMAO, I have to say my favorite thing of all time from it was the t-shirt babe competition. Harvey put up the relevant links in today’s retrospective, but I thought I’d just go ahead and write my remembrance of it. Basically, the idea came about because I thought having a t-shirt model would help sell more t-shirt, but I also had the secondary idea of finding out whether I had any attractive readers to my blog who I could then totally hit on because they were already fans of mine. So I came up with the idea of a competition where the winner would do modeling photos of my t-shirts and get the prize of a hundred dollar shopping spree at ThoseShirts.com and a $100 cash (which was a lot of money back in 2004). It was a very scary idea because I knew it could turn out horribly, but somehow I got the courage to go through with it. It was pretty nerve racking when there were few entries at first, but as the deadline approached, many came in.

And then I saw her. And I was like, “Hands down; we have a winner.” But it wasn’t up to just me. To make it a real competition, there were nine judges including me, and each would pick five ranked entries, with five points going to their number one choices down to one point for the number five choices. I, of course, picked number SarahK as my number one choice, but the voting was pretty varied. When I added it up, SarahK won by but a single point. I don’t know what was wrong with the other judges. And who knows what would have happened if SarahK lost. But instead she won and then we started talking and eventually had a first date hiking the Grand Canyon and later got married and then had the cutest baby ever. I.e., my t-shirt babe scam totally worked as planned. It was well worth the one hundred bucks cash it cost me.

It should be noted that Harvey was one of the judges and didn’t vote for SarahK as any of his choices. She has hated him ever since and is every day like, “So when are you kicking Harvey off your blog?” And I’m like, “Soon.” But then I’d have to find in the blogging software how to remove his account and I’m just way too lazy.

Anyway, that’s the t-shirt babe story, and probably when IMAO jumped the shark since it’s widely believed that after I got married I became much less funny. But whatever. Screw you guys; I got a t-shirt babe.

Year by year, some of the great posts in IMAO history:
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2002 – A list of the most blood-thirsty posts in IMAO history (which was about 3 months at the time, but it’s still a surprisingly long list, and Frank probably forgot a few).

2003 – Frank’s soul-stirring declaration of war against the evil puppy-blender Instapundit

2004 – The IMAO T-Shirt Babe Contest:
Announcement
FAQ
Entries
Winner!

2005 – The Ballad of Frank J.’s Accident

2006 – I miss John Bolton SO much…

2007 – Clearer Movie Titles – For example, in the WYSIWYG tradition of “Snakes on a Plane”, “Reservoir Dogs” should’ve been called “Bank Robber Flashback Fun” (oodles of great suggestions in the comments)

2008 – Hippie Punching FAQ

2009 – Basil’s done a lot of great Storyboard posts over the years, but “It’s a Good Life” is still my absolute favorite.

2010 – A mystery the MSM is still working on: what to call Obama supporters

2011 – Frank explains how comment moderation works at IMAO. Basil goes one step further and challenges people to TRY to get moderated.

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What was IMAO’s tagline before it got changed to “Unfair. Unbalanced. Unmedicated.”?

If you don’t know, just make something up. It can’t be much worse than the reality.

Now that I’ve been blogging an entire decade, I feel I probably have some wisdom to pass on to other people who hope to start a blog or make theirs more successful. So here are some tips from me that will help you have a successful blog with a large audience — at least until blogging is completely outdated in a couple more years.

FRANK BLOGGING TIPS

1. Have something unique to say. There’s a lot of blogs out there, so make sure you have something different to say from everyone else so people have a reason to come to your blog. For instance, you could be the guy who, in reaction to political issues, is always recommending assassination. Or be the guy on hiding from federal authorities because of your talk of assassination. The idea is be different and interesting.

2. Get a catchy, easy to remember name. Make sure the name of your blog is easy to remember so people can keep finding it. Don’t — and I can’t stress this enough — just make it some seemly random string of letters.us.

3. Have a visually pleasing blog. Make sure you have some color scheme that’s pleasing to the eye, and a layout that is easy to follow. Actually, all this talk of style is kinda girly. Just throw up some colors and a few ads and get writing.

4. Post every day. If you want to build a readership, you need to give them a reason to come back constantly. Maybe even multiple times a day. Just write and write and write. It helps to be unemployed, so there are a lot of good potential bloggers out there right now.

5. Proofread. To make sure people take you seriously, you need to use proper grammar and spelling. So meticulously proofread each of your posts. After you write a post, let it sit at least an hour and then come back to it to read it over carefully. Then wait another hour… Know what? This is way too hard. Forget this one.

6. Engage your readership. To get a loyal readership, it helps to interact with them. A comment section is useful for this. The idea is to build a sense of community. And yes, they’ll probably all be annoying and you’ll hate them, but act nice to them and just vent about them behind their backs on Twitter.

7. Study more successful bloggers. To know how to be a good bloggers, it helps to carefully watch the habits of successful bloggers. Do all the research you can on them. If you can find where they live, rummage through their trash and follow them around. Hopefully you can find something to use to blackmail them to send links your way. Don’t just post the blackmail material on your blog, even if it’s something really juicy about puppies and a blender.

8. Get co-bloggers. Find people who write like you and invite them to write on your blog so you have more content. But don’t make the authorship of each post very obvious so people can mistake your co-bloggers for you. Eventually you can just stop writing entirely if this works well enough.

9. Avoid distractions. A wife and children are huge distractions to blogging; avoid them at all costs. I can’t stress this enough. Blogging is art, and like with all art, any sort of a fulfilling life will just get in the way.

10. Start your blog in 2002 or earlier. In 2002, most people didn’t even know what a blog was and there were a lot less of them giving you less competition for an audience. You didn’t even have to be very good to get readers; you just had to be there.

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UPDATE: Linked by Doug Ross

Year by year, some of the great posts in IMAO history:
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2002 – Frank’s other plan for world peace.

2003 – The first lie ever told about Glenn Reynolds on the internet.

2004 – Frank vs. the Limey. Some troll from England sent Frank hate mail. So Frank mocked it merciessly. You’d think the Limey would learn his lesson, but apparently he acquired some sort of brain disease from eating bad crumpets. Frank had to beat him up 10 times before he finally went away. The link above is to part 10, and links to the other 9 encounters can be found there.

2005 – Frank turns IMAO into a group blog. Panic ensues amongst the readership.

2006 – The last lie ever told about Glenn Reynolds on the internet.

2007 – The first lie ever told about John Edwards on the internet.

2008 – The last lie ever told about John Edwards on the internet.

2009 – Not having The Limey to kick around, Frank starts a flame war with Fark. Petty Farkers rate the post 400 times trying to make it look bad, little realizing that no one who reads IMAO bases their decision on post-ratings. As Frank said, “what a gaggle of morons.”

2010 – Say, are the Democrats still using that new logo and “Change That Matters” motto?

2011 – Romney 2012 Slogans. As far as I know, the Romney campaign has yet to improve on these. Or the even better ones that got left in the comments.

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NOTE: In honor of IMAO 10th Blogiversary Week, this is a special edition of lolimao! where the challenge was to insert the IMAO nuked-moon logo into a picture.

lolbama! will return next Tuesday.

Submit for next week’s lolbama! at lolterizt@gmail.com

From Les of Brick Moon:

From Les of Brick Moon:

From Son of Bob:

An uncaptioned lolbama! picture for you for next week:

Yes, that’s a real picture of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

PRODUCTION NOTES:
#1: When creating lolbama! pictures, please caption with either black or white text, as colors like red and yellow tend to blur badly when I compress the images.

#2: Standard image size for these posts is 350px wide by whatever high. If you can have your images 350px wide before you caption them, I won’t end up shrinking your captions into illegibility when I re-size the images.

MAKE YOUR OWN: The free lolbuilder from I Can Has Cheezburger.

STYLE NOTE: Short captions are usually better. Your goal is 10 words or less, with humor value tending to increase exponentially as the number of words approaches 1.

Send your submissions to lolterizt@gmail.com and – if they aren’t obscene (IMAO is a PG-13 site) and don’t suck too terribly bad – I’ll post them for you. Remember to include your name (and blog URL, if applicable) so I know who to thank.

From In My World: Buck the Marine and the Jolly Rancher Bandits:

“According to the Marine kill’n manual,” Buck answered, “when surrounded you kill everyone… in a circle.”

Classic IMAO.

Also, just about the only line in the piece without a typo.

Harvey has been doing retrospectives of posts from the previous ten years, but I thought I’d do my own shot at what I consider some of my favorite IMAO posts ever. I’ll probably miss a bunch of good ones, but there’s been a lot of posts over ten years so I’ve probably forgotten a bunch of really funny ones.

The In My Worlds were popular posts (which I still write every now and then), and I even have a book collecting a lot of them. Picking just one to link (you can put your favorites in the comments), I always liked this one.

Here’s hate mail I wrote Michael Moore. I always loved this one, especially the line, “Aye, what a sound beating I received; quite proportionate to my size.”

Know Thy Enemy is another popular group of posts which maybe I’ll do more of. Here’s one on brush fires, notable because it was the first IMAO post SarahK read.

Here’s my guide to the Homeland Security Alert Levels. I think someone actually made some videos illustrating some of these.

Here’s where I exposed the crimes of Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds. He still puts up links to reviews of powerful blenders to taunt me.

The announcement of the t-shirt babe winner.

For a while I spared with some troll from England I called “The Limey.” Here’s my favorite post on that because it contains the fable of Fascist McFascist.

Since SarahK won the contest to be my t-shirt babe, she was at the time the only other IMAO employee. So we had an IMAO employee team-building trip to the Grand Canyon (our first date). Here’s part of my write up of it.

Here’s me finding a possible forged document about Bush being AWOL.

My illustrated endorsement of Bush in 2004.

Here’s my announcement of being engaged to SarahK (includes a quote from my father). Make sure to also read SarahK’s much better write-up which includes pictures.

Back before I really got started on PJ Media, I wrote my own attempt at editorials on IMAO (with a nice picture of me showing how serious and thoughtful I am). Here’s one on me judging how the Iraq war was going.

When things were looking bad for the Republicans in 2006, I decided to add some liberal commentary from Scary Evil Monkey. There’s even a video from him taunting us after the results of that election.

Here’s my plans for a space laser and an illustration of what a dinosaur with rocket launchers would look like.

I wish I had more time for drawing comics, as I really liked those. Here’s one about SarahK getting her gun taken by a police officer (based on a true story).

I was a big supporter of Fred Thompson in 2008. It started with this post of facts, and I ended up doing one a day until he left the race.

The famous 3 AM photoshop. My idea, though Cadet Happy pulled it off so nicely.

The Dick Cheney assassination squad.

The family that blogging made.

And I know I’m forgetting a ton of great posts, but it’s a lot of archives to go through. If you can think of some big ones I missed, put it in the comments (with links if you can find them).

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UPDATE: Linked by YouViewed

UPDATE: Linked by Spootville

Year by year, some of the great posts in IMAO history:
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2002 – Don’t compare Frank J. to Hitler. However, he does share views with Saddam Hussein.

2003 – IMAO invents the reality show where losers are systematically eliminated, which Survivor later ripped off and started broadcasting 3 years earlier. I didn’t win, but I did come in a respectable second (or “First Loser,” as Frank never tires of reminding me)

2004 – As revenge for the constant taunting, I beat up Frank J. and stole his funny.

2005 – IMAO invents the podcast (which you can still hear here.)

2006 – Things I Learned on My Disney Cruise

2007 – Frank discovers numerous facts about Fred Thompson. Oddly, Fred chuckles harmlessly instead of punching Frank into the sun.

2008 – The iconic image of Obama’s campaign? It wasn’t the “Hope” poster, it was “The 3am Phone Call“. Fun fact: it took literally months of aggressive emailing to get Snopes to add a source link to this post.

2009 – Still as true today: Top Ten Ways the Health Care Bill Is Like Ted Kennedy

2010 – Also still true: “The president’s a dork.”

2011 – Say, remember back when liberals cared about “civility”? I mean a LOT.

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When I first thought of blogging ten years ago, I was really excited to get to it. That’s why I didn’t spend much time on the name. I know some people used the abbreviation “IMHO” for “In My Humble Opinion”, so I thought I’d use “IMAO” for “In My Arrogant Opinion”.

That was a horrible idea.

I’ve since had to spend the past ten years answering questions of what exactly does my blog’s name mean. And anytime I say it, I have to be really careful as people will get it confused with LMAO, INAO, IAMO, etc. Also, I didn’t think to check URLs when I made the name, so I had to get IMAO.us since IMAO.com wasn’t available. IMAO.com was a website for a Korean handle manufacturer, but the URL was since bought for thousands of dollars by someone just hoping to catch people who mistype my URL… which is kind of flattering.

Anyway, if I had to do it all over again, I’d come up with a better name. Like just “Nuke the Moon”. That would be a blog name people would remember. Or “Hippie Punch”. Something dynamic.

What would you name IMAO?

I’ve had a number of cobloggers here at IMAO, so I thought as part of the tenth blogiversary, it would be nice to look back on what’s happened with all of them.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW

Spacemonkey: Dead
Laurence Simon: Dead
SarahK: Married
Right Wing Duck: Dead
Harvey: Wisconsin
Basil: Dead
Mr. Right: I don’t know who he is
Cadet Happy: Whereabouts unknown, but if found, will be made dead

So what do you remember from ten years of IMAO? And what are your favorite posts?

And why don’t you go through the archives here and at the old version of the site and try and find some forgotten gems and post them in the comments here. I’d do it, but you probably aren’t as busy and important as me.