I’m Meg Geddes (netmeg), and MichiganFireworks.com is my baby. Well, one of them.
I’ve always loved fireworks; from sparklers to big community boomers. I grew up with fireworks in Ann Arbor at Buhr Park, and then city airport, but at some point, we stopped having them. I don’t even remember why – I think maybe it was more the logistics than the money. Nobody wanted to deal with the hassles of traffic and cleanup.
Anyway, every year I’d be searching out where the closest fireworks were, and it got to the point where the people who knew of my interest would email or call, and from there it was a short hop to just putting up a quick and dirty web page to refer them to. The first version of this site was called detroitfireworks.com and included two listings – the big fireworks in Detroit, and the Ford Lake fireworks in Ypsilanti. Here’s an ancient version of it – it’s not the oldest one that exists, but it’s probably the oldest one that will actually load.
So after a while, people would not only ask me about the fireworks, but actually send me their local listings and ask if I’d put them up too. So with the help of my friend Lee Payne, who has a lot more database and coding skills than I will ever have, we expanded the site. After a few years, we had a couple hundred displays, then 400, then 500. And people bookmarked it, and emailed it to their friends, and posted events on Facebook, and well, here we are today.
I call it “Hobbies Gone Wild”
Seriously, this thing has taken off to a degree I never thought possible. Michiganders really love their fireworks! I can’t even count the hours I have spent on coding, writing, finding and verifying events, answering emails (more on that later), making corrections, hunting down people who scrape all my data without properly attributing, and so forth. (Yea, I’m a bit spiky about that last. Read about why here) But over the years, it’s probably thousands of hours. And some amount of expense too. All because I like things that go *boom*
Presumably you’re here because you like the *boom* too. I hope you find what you’re looking for, and if you don’t, I’d like to hear about it. I’m always up for feedback and constructive criticism.
The 2013 Michigan Fireworks.com data base we published on June 28th 2013 garnered 412 visits good for third place among the 900 stories we ran since we started publishing this blog in 2011 . Our 2014 MichiganFireworks.com Listing of Michigan fireworks by date had 214 visitors good for good for 7th place overall. The decrease in visitors 2003 to 2014 is due the rather generous reprinting policy of MichiganFireworks.com
To bring their comprehsensive listings (and perhaps the most comprehensive of any state) to our readers all we are required to do is credit MichiganFireworks.com as the source and to provide a link to their website. Our links to Michiganfireworks.com are provided in red.. Most likely many of our firework fans from past years are going to directly to Michiganfireworks.com. That is particularly evident this week when many of our readers are using our on page archive to get the web address for Michiganfireworks.com and thus producing a weekly total like the one below.
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