The Ninth Edition rolled out several months late. It should have been released in Fall of 2004, but crazy work schedules kept me away from any major updates. I finally got around to updating the graphical look when I took a week off in March 2005.

For this edition, the news updates took on a much bigger life than they used to, with updates to every section except the Photos page virtually nonexistant. I was trying to write more interesting posts than "this is what I did today", although some of those posts are inevitable. On August 3, 2001, I posted:

I wonder how long I can sustain interesting daily updates before I succumb to the "One-Line Link" syndrome of many blogs I read. For the uninitiated, blog is the abbreviation for weblog, and it's something of a personal online diary that uses special software to make updating a no-brainer. This news page is coded by hand, so technically it's just a faux-blog. Feel free to refer to it as an o-blog, since we live in an age when the word, weblog, is too long for our collective attention spans.

Almost four years later I was still going strong with regular updates, with no lack of attention in sight!

The Tenth Edition was my attempt to restore the Zone to some of its former glory by putting some effort into making the daily updates worth coming back for. The opening month, August 2005, was the most verbose, but updates slowly whittled down to manageable sizes after readers complained that they couldn't handle so many words in a single update. I tried to cover a smattering of topics that would appeal to everyone, from reviews to music to computer stuff, and managed to win several new readers who now make up the core of my daily readership!

There wasn't anything glaringly new about the Eleventh Edition, but I like to think that I'd found a consistent, enjoyable voice in my daily updates. Off the web, this period was characterized by too much Warcraft PvP, several months of intense overtime at work, and a new girlfriend.

The daily updates continued in 2007 and 2008, in addition to my new occasional feature, Museday Tuesdays. By the end of this period, having grown tired of the constant outages and bad support offered by my host of five years, Futurepoint, I made the switch to Kattare which opened up a brand new realm of Java and Servlet possibilities, just in time for the Thirteenth Edition in August 2008.

For the first time, the URI! Zone was database-driven, making it more fun and less tedious to write updates. Although there were a couple of months (like May 2009) overburdened with work overtime, I used Java to make the site a friendlier place (adding birthdays, links to Facebook, and commenting improvements, for example). News updates this year followed a steady pattern: Mondays were usually Weekend Wrap-ups, Tuesdays were for Muses or News, Wednesday was Memory Day, Thursday was for Lists and Reviews, and Friday was for Fragments.