Happy Blogiversary To Me

(bumped to the top throughout the day. New stuff below.)

This site is four years old today, and to briefly segue into a "State of the Blog Address," the past year was tremendously successful. As of today 138,984 have visited the site, with 164,485 page views, according to sitemeter stats. Last year at this time, the numbers were 57,765 uniques and 69,771 page views, which means I dwarfed the previous numbers for the past three years combined. Not to mention that I am fortunate enough to get my stuff out on much bigger sites than this one, like Calitics and Hullabaloo. I truly feel honored to be a part of this community and the overall progressive movement, and thanks to everyone who comes to this little piece of the universe to read my meanderings.

I also want to engage in a little experiment on this blogiversary week. This hobby takes up a tremendous amount of my time. I wrote over 3,200 posts this year. Some might call it an unhealthy obsession; those people would be everyone who knows me. It's actually not the writing (I write pretty quickly) but the reading, the researching, the email, the organizing and the offline stuff that takes up all the time. It's great that I'm in the position to do it, but outside a scattered set of Blogads and some other minor revenue streams I get little personal financial reward from this. I do this out of a love of country (despite, oddly, the fact that I hate America) and a penchant for personal expression, but I also feel there's at least some intrinsic value in what I do. And what I've learned over the years is that unless you ask for something you're not likely to get it.

So I'm going to do a blog fundraiser this week. I have a Paypal address that you can access at this link:

I'll put the donate button on the side column as well.

This is a movement that has its roots in a group of people doing it as a labor of love. That's just not all that sustainable and can quickly lead to burnout. If you read the site, if you appreciate what I do, I would be very grateful if you threw a few shekels my way so I can continue to do it at the same high level. Thanks so much. It's a sincere pleasure to be able to communicate with you all on a daily basis. And we're doing the work that needs to be done to take our country back.

dave