Headers

 In celebration of the twentieth year of this blog, I have a few tales to tell. This post is one of them. This series will occur off and on throughout this anniversary year, I hope to illuminate some behind-the-scenes stories and highlights from the blog during this time. Enjoy!

 The day is drawing nigh when this blog will have reached the milestone of 20 years of online existence with nearly daily posts throughout. The subject matter of the posts is paramount, of course, but there is no denying that the header, the image that leads you into this blog, is also important.

I started out with the Blogger generated header for the time which was pretty generic! This did not last long before my coworker at that time, Jeff Kerkove, decided this place needed something distinctive. Since Jeff was the one who had set the site up for me, he had the ability to get in here and change the template. I was totally unaware he had done anything until I opened up this blog to post one day and hey! There it was. (A modified version of the header can be seen above.)

This header was the one I called "The Fly Header" due to there being a house fly in the design. This header was a daily constant for probably a year before Jeff decided I needed another change. By this time I had become a bit of a "known resource" for 29"er stuff, so Jeff designed a header accordingly.

The second header Jeff Kerkove designed for this blog

 The second header lived up top for several years here. By 2014 I was transitioning out of doing mountain bike/29"er reviews and I thought the header was a bit misleading. I was far more into gravel stuff, and this precipitated my changing the header. 

Since by that time Jeff had been long gone to greener Ergon pastures in Colorado, I did not have the luxury of leaning on his expertise in graphic design. However; I had already figured out how to change a header, and honestly, Blogger made it dead simple by 2014 to do so. 

My experience doing website stuff with the 29"er site and my "Gravel Grinder News" blog made it a simple choice for me to swap out the old "29"er" header to a rotating header featuring scenes from where I actually was riding. 

One of the earlier headers after I changed from running the static "29"er" header. 

I thought it might be fun to feature some of my favorite headers from the past. There are a LOT of these headers I have saved, so in order to do this idea justice I am going to do two things. 1 - I am going to start rotating headers through the top of this page until May 15th, when the anniversary will be celebrated. 2 - I am going to go through all the headers I have saved and post a photo dump of the top ten, or maybe twenty - one for each year of this blog. I haven't decided yet. 

So, if you read this post, you will be in on the "secret". The header you see now up there is the first of this rotation. Each header you see up there through May 15th, 2025, will be one from the archives. On May 15th I will run the original "generic" header for a special post. Then I will return to "regularly scheduled headers"! Ha!

I look forward to digging through the old headers and posting them. The header dump of ten or twenty headers will be coming up soon. Stay tuned. Thanks for reading Guitar Ted Productions!