This Blog R 8

Eight years ago today I hit "Publish" on the first post to this blog.  Short and sweet, it went like this:

Testing, testing, testing....

Is this thing on?

Apparently so. Too bad I managed to lose the opening essay it took me an HOUR to compose. Oh well. I'll reconstruct it and put it back up later.

Welcome to The Smallest Minority, so named because most of the really good names, Eject! Eject! Eject!, USS Clueless, Instapundit, Acidman, and so on were already taken. And while not a Randian, I accept a lot of Ayn Rand's observations as accurate, and it was she who wrote: "The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."

This blog is about the rights of individuals, that smallest of minorities, so it seemed apt.

More (hopefully MUCH more) to follow.

And much more has followed. According to Blogger I've published over 5,000 posts, an average of 1.7 per day.  (Haven't kept that pace recently.) According to Sitemeter, the site has drawn over 2.2 million hits, an average well over 700 per day (and trust me, it didn't start out anywhere near that high).

I lost the 40,000+ comments collected by Echo (and before that, HaloScan) over the previous seven years when Echo decided that increasing their fees by a factor of ten was a smart business decision. Oh, I still have the comment archives, but I was never able to successfully import them to Disqus. Dammit. Surprisingly, the old comment threads are still working (like to the Überthread - it's 574 comments long, so give it a chance to load) but I don't have links to each and every comment thread for every post - nor do I know how much longer those links will be working.  I'm still seriously bummed by that.

Eight years in the blogiverse is a long time, and I've enjoyed most of it, but as I noted in This I Believe, this blog has been an exploration of the core beliefs that guide my daily life.  Some of those beliefs are unpleasant.  But then, reality can be a stone-cold bitch.  While I still believe that the courts will not save us, (further evidence given just recently) I will admit that I was far too pessimistic about what could be accomplished via that path but not at all pessimistic enough about what can still be done to us via that same vector.  I'm even more amazed at what we've been able to accomplish legislatively.

I do wish I was less pessimistic about our political "leaders." Hell, I wish I was less pessimistic about the electorate.

Still, on the whole I'm glad I chose to start this blog and stick with it.  I hope in addition to giving me that place to explore my core beliefs and rant to my heart's content, it has also provided a service to those of you who visit, read and comment here on a regular basis.  I do this to entertain me, but I probably wouldn't have done it nearly as long without that feedback.

So, thanks.  Thanks for making all those hours worthwhile.  Thanks for giving me things to think about and things to laugh about.  I think I'll keep at it, at least for the next couple of years.  The Mayan calendar notwithstanding, 2012 looks like it's going to be one helluva year.