Today is the one-year anniversary of the launch of Credit Slips. We started this blog as a supplement to our research and teaching, all of us having interests in policy and regulatory issues on debt and bankruptcy. We have especially appreciated our friends who have joined as guest bloggers for a week or so. Their contributions have been uniformly insightful and have added new perspectives to the blog.

As I think back on the year, blogging has been a great experience. The biggest surprise to me has been the wide audience we have found. It’s been great to have our work reach an audience who might not otherwise have seen it. In return, I have had my own work enriched by the interactions and reactions to our blog content. Academic journals run my life, but I would like to think my academic work is better for being informed by everyday reality. Although I only want to speak for myself on that point, I suspect the other regular Credit Slips bloggers would agree.

The biggest challenge has been to keep Credit Slips going as part of our day job. We’re supposed to push back the frontiers of knowledge–inside joke with a friend who always would respond "yeah, but in what direction"–with our research and teaching. It’s not entirely clear where Credit Slips fits into that. It’s more than a personal hobby, but it ain’t quite research or teaching. Nevertheless, we’ll keep writing, if you’ll keep reading.

What will the future hold for Credit Slips? Right now, I think we will continue to do more of what we have been doing. Our goal never has been to be a comprehensive source of news on credit and bankruptcy issues. We’ll keep commenting on what we see that interests us from our research and teaching. We’ll keep having guest bloggers who add new perspectives. We’ll also keep trying new things, keep those that work and get rid of those that don’t. All of us recently met, and our sense was that Credit Slips was generally going in a good direction. If there is something we can do to make the site better, please feel welcome to say so in the comments. We’ll do our best to keep improving Credit Slips, within the limits of what we can do and still keep these great day jobs we all have.

So, have a cupcake to celebrate. If you follow the suggestion in the graphic and put one candle in it, the calories won’t count.