A History of Toasting with Chelsea

As I celebrate 5 years of the Cheers! with Chelsea domain, I cannot help but wonder over my own blog’s history and how we came to toasting with Chelsea. On this day in 2019, I announced that I would be shifting from my long-standing domain of dragonempress.net to cheerswithchelsea.com. However, there has been so much more to this blog experience before adopting its current name. For both myself and others, I wanted to talk a little about the history that led up to Cheers! with Chelsea.

I have had the desire to track down when exactly all my blogging days started for a while now. Obviously, my website has gone through many iterations, but sadly, many have been lost to migration data loses. With this in mind, I expected tracking down the exact information to be a challenge. Surprisingly, tracking down my original blog start came easier than anticipated…

From Web Design & Livejournal to WordPress

For certain, I know my website building days started around 2005. My dragonempress.net domain was dubbed “Sabishi Yogensha” or the lonely prophet. I was obsessed with dragons and heavily influenced by anime. At the same time, I had grown a passion for creative web design layouts and graphic designs. Instead of having a blog hosted directly on my website, it was through LiveJournal. In 2007, my webhost was advertising blogging through WordPress.com. My first post is still alive there, but shortly after, I figured out how to have it integrated through my webhost. WHAT a journey!

Blogging Motivated by Countdowns

I posted maybe one or two posts every quarter. WordPress was quite different from LiveJournal and the community focus was different too. Ironically, it seems I blogged best with a countdown in mind. That first year of 2007, I did a 12 days of Moonmas; a countdown to Christmas using characters from a story I still hope to write/illustrate one day. For this countdown, the girl interacts with Moon-dwellers by introducing Christmas concepts that would be foreign to those who live on the moon. This was my first big haul of posts on the blog in such a close proximity of time and I thrived on it. Although, in true Chelsea fashion, I never actually completed it either. Day 12 was never done.

However, in October of 2010, I was hit with the idea to post random Halloween things every day as I went through the month. This was inspired by a discovery of candy corn piled in front of my work parking space on the 1st of October.

Little did I know that there was already an amazing group of people doing this. I joined the ranks of the Cryptkeeper’s Countdown to Halloween in 2011 as Ladydragon Queen and I’ve been a part of it ever since. Regrettably, many of these posts are no longer around. Just broken ghost links and some photos here or there if you know where to look. My current Halloween countdown records go back as far as 2017, with a sprinkling of posts from 2016 through 2013.

Early Toasting with Chelsea History (Pre-Domain Change)

In December of 2016, I tried to lean in hard to rebranding myself from the Ladydragon Queen to Cheers! with Chelsea. The overarching idea was toasting along with Chelsea (cheerswithchelsea was taken as a handle). I had always wanted to work more with video and I thought I could do so with a “toast to an adventure a day” kind of segment. That lasted for a little while, but then I became pregnant with our Little Monster. Despite all my ambitions to get a hold on the consistencies of blogging and vlogging, mom life took over in more ways than I anticipated. There were still many toasts to be had, but the frequency of them had started to dwindle yet again.

A Toasting with Chelsea Comeback (Post-Domain Change)

As mentioned above, in 2019, I announced that I would be shifting from my long-standing domain of dragonempress.net to cheerswithchelsea.com. I was finally getting my branding to match. But again, my Lil’ Boo was on the way and COVID graced our lives. All my bright shiny ideas were pushed to the back burner. It feels like each year since has been more and more of a struggle to regain that consistency.

I’ve still tried my best and I am looking toward treating 2025 as my “catch-up” year. All those posts that haven’t been carried out will hopefully finally see the light of day. Even if it is a little late.

So, until the next time…cheers! to this wild ride of a history to toasting with Chelsea!