It was on a cold day in 2007 that a small team gathered outside Detroit, Michigan. SolidSignal.com was a scant five years old back then. You can take a look at how our site looked on practically that same day, February 1, 2007.
Solid Signal was a tight group back then, full of pioneers with a lot of drive and a lot of ideas. We still have drive and ideas today, but of course it’s a little-different when you’re a massive success story with an 18-year history. Back then, the future wasn’t always certain, and folks were willing to try pretty much anything.
Start a blog, they said.
The Solid Signal Blog was started with three articles. It took about a month for them to go live, after the first plans were made. I recently made a recreation of that first site, more or less. It probably looked a lot like this:
Not a lot of style, but everything starts small, right? Little did anyone know what it would become. You can still read articles from those days by looking at the Archives section of this site.
About the same time the blog was started, support forums using the then-popular vBulletin platform started up. Those forums, by the way, ran for about a decade. They attracted some of the best minds in the peer support world. But that’s a story for another day.
Exactly five years later…
It was in January, 2012 that I joined Signal Group, LLC for the purpose of revitalizing The Solid Signal Blog. I had an idea to merge the blog and forum components using a single platform. The result looked like this on day one:
It was a little busy, a little dated by today’s standards. But it was a move in the right direction. The Solid Signal Blog had about 50 articles its first five years, but I wanted to blow that up.
The legacy
The Solid Signal Blog has been publishing roughly 100 articles a month since February 1, 2012. In the last eight years we’ve come close to publishing 10,000 articles, stories, news items, and tutorials. Unfortunately not all of those articles survived the transition to our new platform in 2017. About 4,000 were dated news items, sale notices, and things like that that really didn’t need to be transferred over. Some… were just lost and that’s the way it goes.
Today the Solid Signal Blog is back over 6,000 articles and they’re better than ever. The blog enters its fourteenth year with a new emphasis on tutorials and a focus on the thousands of new items available at SolidSignal.com.
We also host the best collection of PDF tutorials, including our Ultimate Guide to Upgrading which has been downloaded over 100,000 times. Our list of DIRECTV error codes is one of the most-searched articles on the blog and Google ranks it as a featured search result.
A lot of people
As I write this, 3,796,268 unique devices have visited The Solid Signal Blog. It’s hard to say for sure how many people that translates to, but I’m going to guess it’s over three million. Gosh. Three million people. It’s flattering to think that this project has had that kind of impact. It may not sound like a lot when an Instagram influencer can rack up eleven million followers in a matter of weeks, but for something not-so-mainstream it’s a pretty awesome number. I’m humbled that you’re one of them, and I want to thank you for the time you spend here. It’s going to be a great 2020!
