BackPageLead was born on March 9, 2010, in the days leading up to the opening round of the NRL season, and as grandstands were being assembled down the road from our Albert Park office for the upcoming Australian F1 Grand Prix.

The idea for a sports opinion website came from a few sportswriters no longer working for newspapers who wanted to take advantage of the immediacy and spontaneity that online journalism provided. Want to vent about the Melbourne Storm salary cap crisis? Great, and an hour or two later, voila - there it was, published for the world to see. Unhappy about the job being done by the Australian cricket selectors? Fine, and in significantly less time than our bowlers took to dismiss Alastair Cook, the column was sub-edited, headlined and uploaded.   

It would be dishonest to pretend, of course, that ego didn't play a part - these are journalists we're talking about, after all - and we thought one or two people might actually be interested in what we had to say. And some days, one or two was about right.

But before we even thought about counting down to launch date there was a whole new language to learn, skills to master and technologies to conquer. Was Joomla the platform to use? What was an SEO strategy? How did I make sense of Google Analytics? How was the CPM calculated? And 'bounce rate' - did that have anything to do with Novak Djokovic's pre-service routine?

And "accessing the back end" of the site, what was all that about? This, I discovered to my relief, involved the CMS - or Content Management System, as most people on the planet already knew - and through the CMS I found I could access the back end to my heart's desire.

Not long after we began operations - with the softest of soft launches - the Melbourne Storm scandal broke. And that set the trend for a frenetic year in which Australia came a gutser at football's World Cup in South Africa - and later the bidding process for 2022 World Cup - Mark Webber stalled in the home straight to the F1 drivers' title race, Collingwood won its first premiership for 21 years, St George-Illawarra claimed its first NRL pennant as a merged club and Australia's cricketers somehow lost The Ashes at home.   

The high points often came out of the blue.

When we published a column by senior cricket writer Ken Piesse, who'd done an interview with Sri Lanka's wicket-taking genius Muttiah Muralidharan ahead of his retirement from Test cricket, we put a slightly provocative headline on it: 'No Aussie batsmen in my top 10: Murali', left the office a short time later and went home.

The piece - it transpired - was immediately picked up by cricinfo.com, the biggest cricket site in the world and one read each day by millions of cricket-lovers, especially Indians, and placed on their home page, with the teaser headline and a link to backpagelead.com.au.

The story was published on Cricinfo shortly before midnight. When I logged on about 8am the next day, I thought my notoriously temperamental PC was playing funny buggers again because I couldn't access BPL. But when I found I could click on to The Age and Herald Sun sites, it began to dawn on me what happened.

And sure enough, when I looked at cricinfo.com, I realised exactly what the problem was. Some time about midnight, tens of thousands of Indians and Sri Lankans had clicked through to BPL to read the Murali story in full - only to send our site crashing to its knees under the weight of numbers.

We got 50,000 readers to the site in next to no time before the Joomla platform cried: no more - and died. The whole thing needed to be rebooted the next morning, costing us a whole new sub-continental readership. (Otherwise, incidentally, Joomla has been a joy to work with.)

So that was a highlight and a lowlight all in one go.

A while earlier, our motoring writer Geoff Harris had written an excellent analysis of the Turkish F1 Grand Prix and the brewing civil war at Red Bull where team bosses seemed to be favouring Sebastian Vettel over our very own Mark Webber. It was headlined: 'Webber seen as villain within Red Bull'. Again, this was picked up by rev-heads everywhere from Frankfurt* to Frankston and was posted high on page one of Google if you searched for 'Turkish Grand Prix' or 'Webber and Vettel'. 

(* You can tell these things by looking at the Google Analytics map of the world, where countries which click on regularly to your site (UK, USA, India) are shaded a darkish green, while those who had never heard of BPL, and were unlikely to ever know what they were missing out on (Guinea Bissau, Uruguay, Turkmenistan and Greenland) had no shade of green at all. The good news, though, was that we had a couple of devoted readers in Nigeria, one in Belarus and another in Mongolia.)   

Wayne Carey's podcasts and vidcasts proved popular and his insights into the AFL were often picked up by the mainstream media. Ashley Browne's dissection of the AFL media, and the teams which the footy reporters (sometimes secretly) supported - along with a mark out of 10 for their degree of ferality - also proved a ratings hit. 

There were lowlights, too. Those weekends early on when we were attracting family members and devoted friends to the site and just about no-one else. Being unable to get accredited for some events because sporting administrators in 2010 still didn't get the concept of New Media. And, of course, the blight of any blog: readers who occasionally write the most vile comments to stories under the cloak of anonymity.

The sports that proved most popular, in order, were: AFL, horse racing, rugby league, cricket and soccer. And, worryingly - for me, at least - every time we posted a UFC story, the traffic numbers spiked. I'm no prude but I just don't get the 'sport', I don't get its appeal and it worries me that this is what passes for sporting entertainment for young people in 2011. (And if that editorial doesn't get a few vile responses, I don't know what will.) 

So, before we blow our lone candle out on the birthday cake, thanks for clicking on to BPL these past 12 months and hope you learned something along the way, or were entertained at the very least - and that you keep hitting the refresh button in 2011.