Yeah, yeah, yeah… I know all about the IE7 Sitemeter bug. I thought it was fixed today, but apparently it is not. Sitemeter has been removed, so you can read this site in IE7 now.

I will refrain from saying, “Get a REAL browser.”

Oops. I said it.

Update: Never mind. I had a Sitemeter fix, but I don’t like the suggestion, so I’m removing it. Something about it isn’t sitting right with me.

Update 2: It is fixed, accoring to SiteMeter.

Seven years ago today—months before Instapundit existed—I launched Yourish.com. Here’s what I wrote in that first post:

Blogging. The new media term taking the Net by storm. Short for Weblog, to Blog is to put up a web site that chronicles your thoughts, your activities, your life, either in the hopes of enlightening yourself and others, or because your ego is the size of Montana.

I’m hoping it’s the former.

I’ve had this domain for several years and done nothing with it. Now Blogging is going to get a chance.

This site will undergo many style changes in the upcoming months, as I have no real idea what I’d like the end product to look like. What I do know is that I’ve spent several years in the industry and know the difference between a point, a pica, and a pixel. I know that the Internet is a wealth of information and misinformation, and anyone can discover just about anything online if s/he looks long enough. I know that my mindset has undergone many changes in the last few years, and will doubtless undergo more as I get older. Growth is change. Stagnation, to me, is worse than death. If I cannot change, just dig me a hole, throw me in and cover me with dirt.

Okay, I’m shuddering at the seven-year-old prose, but that’s because as a writer, I can’t stand most of what I wrote years ago. The style changes aren’t just visual.

We’ve had style changes, and will have another one soon. I was trying to get it done by today, but life got in the way. I’m not as married to anniversaries and deadlines as I was years ago.

In the last seven years, this blog went from being a fairly personal, diary-type blog with bits of current events thrown in to what you see today: A blog that devotes itself to Israel and Jewish issues, with bits of personal events thrown in. A blog with some superb co-bloggers (Snoopy and Soccerdad), with room for more in the future, I’m sure.

I’ve added podcasting to my online repertoire, and gained hundreds of new friends, and thousands and thousands of readers. This blog went over 2 million hits on Sitemeter earlier this year, which lowballs my stats, and which I started a year or two after I started this blog. I’d venture to guess my readers my hit count is about a third higher than sitemeter says. One thing that hasn’t changed is my pages-to-hits ratio. It’s always at least 1.5, and often close to 2. When you read, you really read around here—Sitemeter says I have nearly 3 million pageviews.

I gave up trying to figure out my wordcount. But I’m thinking that’s in the millions as well—a long essay post is often about 800-1000 words, not counting quotes. It’s pretty easy to hit seven figures when you post pretty much every day for six years. (I didn’t post every day the first year.)

I don’t know if I’ve got anyone from the early, early days. I had a few dozen readers at first, then about two hundred per day, then a steady climb up until about a year ago. I’ve stayed pretty static. I get about 1,800-4,500 hits per day, depending on which stat counter you use. I think I’ll split the difference and call it 3,000 readers per day. It’s not that big, and not that small, and I appreciate you all coming back day in and day out. My biggest challenge is trying to read your minds. I’m thinking I must have succeeded somewhat, because I’m still here, and you’re still here.

If you senior Yourish.com readers want to shout out your handles and how long you’ve been reading in the comments thread, go ahead. I don’t require real information, or even an email address. Just give yourself a name of some kind, and tell all the young whippersnappers when you started reading. I know one of my most faithful readers found me on my first blogiversary. Can anyone call pre-April 2002?

Anyway, here’s to seven more years. At least. And yes, there will be cat pictures. Some of you will complain, but you wouldn’t have it any other way. And even if you would, well, my blog. My cats. My rules. I may be a benevolent dictator, but I am a dictator, nonetheless. Seven years and counting.

I’ve noticed a rather deafening silence here lately, a trend that has been going on for quite some time.

Do you all just not want to comment, or are you waiting for me to say something different and new?

‘Cause I gotta tell you, sometimes, I’m all out.

I’m in nothern VA on a weekly basis, often overnight, especially nowadays for some SharePoint training. It cuts into my blogging time (thankfully, Soccer Dad and Snoopy are always here to pick up the slack, and if you’re not reading their blogs, you should be).

I know, I know, I go through this every so often. I know you folks are still reading, and I know how many of you are still reading. (It’s pretty much leveled out for the past year, but at least it’s not going down.) But I have to say, these days, I’m a little unsure of the thoughts of my “invisibles.” (That’s the word I have always used in place of “lurkers,” which is far too negative a term for people who read a blog and don’t comment. Most people who read newspapers don’t write letters to the editor. I don’t see a difference.)

Anyway, if you want me to cover something new, or you’re getting tired of the same-old, same-old—well, then, you wouldn’t be, would you? Or you’d just quit reading, and my stats would go down.

Hm. This requires more thought.

Thanks to those of you who have been hitting my tipjars lately.

I can’t help thinking that there’s someone who sent me a donation about a month ago that I forgot to send a thank-you note, but I can’t find the email. Please forgive the lapse.

There was a major server problem with my web host, but the good folks at Bluehost fixed us up nicely, and we’re back.

Didja miss us?

It’s funny, but one of the things that I seem to have lost in the changeover from writing the HTML for this site myself to using WordPress was my regular commenters.

Granted, I have regular commenters now, and some of you are the same ones that have been around for many years. But I was looking for the posts I wrote about teaching in the past, and wound up going through some months of posts, and, well, there were a lot more comments back in the old days, it seems. Just take a look at this week’s worth of posts and you’ll see what I mean. Very few posts went without a single comment, and two of the more controversial ones had dozens. (Yes, I know, the Messianic “Jews” posts always generate huge debate, but still—lotsa comments.)

What happened out there? How did I lose so many regular readers? Or did you all just stop commenting?

It’s strange, because I have more readers now than I had in 2005. But you’re a lot quieter.

Then again, sometimes I like it quiet. Fewer things to worry about.

Eh. You know me. Never quite happy with the status quo. Onward and upward, and all that.

Well, once I’m done with my bat mitzvah, I’ll have a bit more time to devote to sprucing things up around here.

One thing I will be doing is keeping my cobloggers. The new guy, Elder of Ziyon, is doing a great job. Soccer Dad and Snoopy have been great, too. My blog is in capable hands.

Regular blogging will return on November 5th. Possibly the fourth. I’ll probably post my speech, and maybe even put up a few lines of my haftarah. Gawd. I can’t believe it’s Monday. Holy crap. Four days left to cram for the big day.

By the way, if you haven’t noticed, Elder of Ziyon has joined us. He’s kindly offered to help keep things going here while I”m studying trope.

I do believe I’m beginning to get the hang of it.

All right. I’m coming down to the wire for my adult bat mitzvah preparations. I have to cut back on time-wasting activities, which includes taping but not watching my favorite shows (I’m about to cut out my soap opera completely), and, well, blogging. I have to cut back.

Through a series of circumstances (that include a change of rabbis in my synagogue, which resulted in several of the children moving up their bar/bat mitzvah dates and leaving the rabbi with no time for me), I am rather far behind in my haftorah and Torah readings. So the time I would have spent watching TV and blogging is going to be spent practicing. Judith Weiss has kindly offered to help, as has Rahel. I work better with a person than I do with a computer or practicing on my own.

Blogging, as a result, must be light over the next few weeks. Soccer Dad and Snoopy will be posting, and I’m very grateful to them for that. But I have to cut back to one or two posts a day. So here’s your chance.

If you’ve been dying to write a post about Jewish and Israeli issues, email it to me. You can write it straight or funny. If it’s well-written and makes its point clearly, I will put it up as a guest post with whatever name or pseudonym you wish. If it isn’t up to the quality of writing I’d like to see on my site, I will send you a polite rejection letter. Don’t take it personally. I have very high standards.

If you already are a blogger, and think you have a post you’d like to get more attention here, that’s fine. Send it over, and you’ll get a link to your blog inside the post. Cross-posting is fine, too.

I’m looking to keep this site up to date while I’m busy over the next four weeks. After that, we’ll see what happens. I’m of the opinion that you can never have too much to read, only too little time in which to read it.

Jay has made some changes that should fix the comments problem. As a result, I’ve reinstated the quicktag plugin that allows you to format your comments, as well as the comments preview. Please let me know if you have problems, and mention which browser you use as well.

I’ve disabled all comments plugins. Please let me know if you’re still having trouble publishing comments. Also, if you were one of the people having multiple comments post before, tell me if the problem has cleared up. Thanks.

Internet Explorer, for reasons I cannot understand, is causing comments to be posted twice. There is no such problem with Firefox.

I’m going to take a wild guess and say I need to update my WP and/or my comments plugin.

You may have noticed (or not, as too many of you can’t tell the difference between Snoopy’s post and my posts even though he deliberately uses a different color font for blockquotes, and no, I’m not bitter, why do you ask?), um, let me start again.

You may have noticed a new author. It’s Soccer Dad from, well, Soccer Dad. He’s had posting privileges for a while, since I got too busy to remember to post about Haveil Havalim. Lately he’s decided to do that as well as add more content to the site, and I’m very glad to have the extra help.

So do me a favor, folks—before you use my name in a comment about a post, double-check to see if I’m the post author. Soccer Dad and I have very similar styles, and I haven’t made him use an icon for posting yet (though I may if it gets too confusing).

We’re a multiple-author blog here. I wonder if Lair Simon may even pop up once in a blue moon to post.

If you’ve been wondering how many posts I write per day, I have a math problem for you. Take the number of days in a year. Multiply that times two. Subtract 15. Now take that number and divide it into 3000, and you will get an idea of how many posts I’ve written and published since this blog went Wordpress, back in September of 2005. This does not take into account the many posts I have started and spiked, nor does it take into account my cobloggers’ posts. Snoopy is closing in on 300, and Lair Simon would have been had he not stopped posting here.

So apparently I’ve been publishing an average of four posts per day for the past two years. Funny, it feels like so many more, sometimes. I have no idea how many posts are on my original site. I can find out, but I’d have to figure out a unique identifier before doing the global search (probably the word “permalink,” though there may be some places where that occurs more than once in a post). Suffice to say that I have written millions of words since I started blogging in April of 2001.

Sometimes, a post will take me over an hour to write. Sometimes it’s only a five-minute effort. But I nearly always put a lot of thought into what goes up. Some of you may have noticed a post appear and disappear yesterday. That happens, though only rarely, and usually when I have second thoughts about the tone of the post. You can find it in your RSS, I’m sure. The RSS is an unforgiving publisher/editor, even moreso than Google archives. At least with Google, you can get things taken out of their archives. Not so with RSS feeds. Once your reader has it, it’s theirs forever. Or at least until they delete it from their RSS reader.

3,000 posts. Wow. And if I had a nickel for every post, multiplied by the number of people who read it… yeah, that’d be nice. Oh, well. I think I’ll settle for thanking all of you who contributed to my tipjars, bought me things off my wishlist, and otherwise contributed fiscally to the continuation of this blog. I’ll never get rich writing it, but I get a whole lot of satisfaction. And none of that would be possible without readers. So thanks. Those 3k posts were for me, but they were also for you.

Every so often, some Israel-hating moron finds this blog via a search for something to do with Israel and Jews. The neo-Nazis come out from time to time as well. There are a legion of David Duke defenders out there who apparently Google Duke’s name every single day, and think it is their job in life to defend the convicted felon/neo-Nazi. In fact, I won’t be the least bit surprised to find a comment for this post waiting for me in the moderation queue tomorrow, doing just that.

It boggles my mind that these anti-Zionists and Jew-haters arrive at my blog and leap to the same conclusion: At last, they think, a blog filled with Zionists simply begging to be taught the error of their ways! And I’m just the one to show them!

The anti-Zionists/Jew-haters then completely ignore the commenting policy, which would have led them to the No Israel-Bashing Zone post (and also an explanation of why I laugh at their claims of censorship), and simply go against the current. I suppose they expect a riveting battle of wits against us nasty Zionists, who will then stand back in awe at the anti-Zionist’s astonishing verbal maneuvers, smack ourselves in the forehead and say, “What have we been thinking all this time? Of course, you’re right! Israel bad! Palestinians good!”

Uh, no. Not gonna happen, not now, not ever.

You see, the thing is, I absolutely do not give a crap about what the Israel-haters think of me or my commenting policy. I don’t care what they think about Israel. I don’t care what they think about what I think about Israel. And I don’t care in the least about getting their opinions on my weblog. In fact, I prefer not to have their garbage cluttering up my comments. Let the charges of echo chambers rebound off the virtual walls. I simply don’t give a shit what a Jew-hater thinks, and rest assured, these people are Jew-haters, almost without exception. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Because as these people find they are not allowed to post their comments, they get angrier and angrier, and the comments get more and more angry—or I should say, honest—and the real Jew-hatred comes out. That’s when I assign their IP address to the blacklist and spam filters, and stop seeing their comments at all.

It’s an act played out over and over again, until the Jew-hater finally gives up. It’s usually a behind-the-scenes show that I rarely share with my readers. But every once in a while, some asshole keeps trying long enough that he gives me post fodder again. I supposed I should thank them, but then, I don’t thank anti-Semites. I wish on them what they wish on me and mine.

It is time once again for a chorus of the Yourish.com mantra: Anti-Semites of the world, just die already. Quicker is better.

It was time to update the commenting policy to include a disclaimer. I do approve many comments that I don’t agree with, though usually none that break the No Israel-Bashing rule. And while I don’t approve of comments like this one, it’s not breaking any rules. But it occurred to me that perhaps a disclaimer is in order. Now I have one:

Disclaimer: Although these comments are moderated, posting a comment does not constitute an endorsement of the commenter’s views.

Say, you know how every so often I get tired of the same-old, same-old and want to change things around a bit?

I’m tired of the same-old, same-old.

I may start blogging about politics after all.

Or my trip to look at condo complexes today. First one, eh, second one, wow, I think I found my home. Okay, not really, because it’s only the second one I’ve seen, but I really like it, and I already know someone who lives there. Mind you, I won’t be buying until next year for a variety of reasons, not least of which is paying down the debt I’ve accumulated through the years of under- and unemployment (and may I say again how incredibly happy I am to be gainfully employed, full-time, with a company that has a future).

But I’m adding a few grand to the cost of whatever I buy. That’s for my home theater system. I want a big-screen TV and speakers. I want my mini-movie theater in my home. And to think, it’s less than a year away.

Life is good right now.

Well, hell, since my Bluehost server notice says there are no known issues, I’m going to make my server choke and gasp while walking on a level path for a period of about ten feet, since that seems to be its energy level right now.

If you subscribe to my RSS feed, you should have gotten all the posts I wrote as of Sunday afternoon, which means no files were lost during the server outage. I could give you a detailed breakdown of what happened, but then I’d have to go over to the Bluehost forums and, well, read about what actually happened. I have always chosen to keep an eye out on the page that notifies me how my server box is doing when there’s a particularly heavy load. As my site is usually up within minutes of noticing any downtime, I haven’t bothered with the forums.

I have to say I’m disappointed that my site was down for some 30 hours. I was extremely busy late this afternoon and checked it again around six and pretty much went ballistic that it was still down, and was trying to get in touch with my hosting service to let them know that my patience was gone. However, by the time I put down the phone to the help center because I kept getting a busy signal, I saw signs of life, and then got my posts in my RSS feed (so I can tell when it’s broken, that’s why, and now I realize also that I can restore posts if I keep the RSS feeds until each backup, so you can count on my begging for RSS feed posts at some point in the future from my readers, because, well, stuff happens, and damn, this parenthetical statement is long), and so, the beast was caged. Lucky for them, because I could feel my inner Hulk coming to the surface.

Still, I’ve been happier with Bluehost than with my previous service. Just wasn’t very happy the past 29 hours.

No, I have no more news at this time. The server is still extremely slow.

Trying to back up files in case the server blows up again.

No, I have no more news at this time. The server is still extremely slow.

Trying to back up files in case the server blows up again.

Folks, regular commenters keep on getting put into Spam Karma’s spam queue. I don’t know why. I’ve had to manually recover comments every day for several days now.

If I can’t figure out why it’s happening, I may have to go to completely moderated comments. Which is far too much extra work.

If anyone out there knows more about Spam Karma than I, advice would be helpful.

I’m still seeing normal user comments go into the spam queue. There’s not even a spam score; they’re being tagged with question marks. I’ve recovered a few more and taken out something that I think may be confusing Spamkiller, but I really don’t know what’s going on.

If your comments disappear, that may be why.

Folks, for some reason that I cannot fathom, comments are heading into the spam queue that don’t belong there. I’ve manually retrieved a few over the last week or so. If yours head there and it shouldn’t, give me a bit of time to catch it. If it keeps happening, send me an email.

It was a series of circumstances that conspired to become three or four hours of downtime. So you must all check in twice as often when you read this post to make up for the stats I lost.

It was an Apache glitch on the server, caused by a SQL glitch in my database, which caused the server to accuse my blog of being a CPU hog (which it isn’t) and make it look like I haven’t paid my bill (which I have).

I may have to, oh, I dunno, sue the server for defamation or something. Can you sue a computer?

Anyway, I went to synagogue tonight, because our new rabbi is here while our departing rabbi is on vacation for the next week or two, and I didn’t have time to stay on the phone and tell the nice people at Bluehost that their server was lying about me. But they fixed it mighty quick when I finally got the chance to call. And the nice gentleman on the line said, “On a Friday night, you really should call first. We don’t have a lot of staff.” I explained that I would have called, if it had not been a Friday night. I think I confused him.

But again. Fixed now.

Okay, this is cool. I had no idea I had so many inbound links, but apparently, it’s up over 280,000.

You can have a real blogwar there, and find out which of your favorite bloggers have more or fewer inbound links than I. There’s a blogger—I won’t name names—that I thought was more popular than I. Turns out, not so much. Ha!

Yep. Ego. I’ve still got it.

A substantial number of you are ignoring the poll (be still my heart; I never would have suspected that), but if the remainder are fairly representative of my readers (and that’s a big if, but it’s the only if we have to go by), then here is how things look so far:

A substantial number of my readers are Jewish, as I suspected, but as I also knew, a large minority is Christian. And very few of you are Christian Zionists. Gee. Go figure. The conventional wisdom is wrong about Christian Zionists, too. Who knew? (Okay, we did, but still…)

What surprised me is the percentage of Conservative Jews who read this blog. Yes, I’m Conservative, but there are fewer of us than there are of the other two denominations.

The overwhelming majority (59%) of my readers consider themselves centrists. That would be because the overwhelming majority of Americans consider themselves centrists. Several of you have asked me to break out the poll into social and political issues. I will do that when I get the chance.

This one didn’t surprise me at all, which is why I added the second answer for why you read: I have a lot of readers who hate cat posts.

Sorry, folks, but sometimes, you simply have to post kitty pictures. They’re staying. As for the rest, I’m starting to think you guys really, really don’t want me to change the formula. The answer to what I should change around here:

Hm. I think the humor may be heading over to Hot Air for a while, because I’ve always been a visual writer, and I’m finally getting a chance to express some of the things I see in my head. But some will spill over to here, I’m sure.

By the way, if you haven’t taken the poll, please do. I know how many of you read me every day, and so far, the poll-takers are in single-digits of the percentage of people who read. Geez. You could at least bump it up to 10%.

I have an idea of who reads my blog and why, but only an idea. You guys have been driving me crazy lately, because you’re simply not commenting, and it’s hard to tell which of my posts are working and which are not.

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I go through periods where I try to find out what keeps bringing my readers back every day. I’m willing to change some things at your request, if those requests fit into what I like to write about, or my vision of this weblog. If they don’t, I pull the “This is not a democracy; it’s a dictatorship” card and overrule you. But I can’t make those decisions if you’re not speaking, so I’m going to try to figure out what to do by giving you some census questions to answer.

Please let me assure you that I have no access to any data other than the results of the poll, just like you. And please, please, please—answer the questions. Take a minute or two. Especially my “invisibles,” the vast majority of my readers who come here every single day, and never email, or comment, or do anything but read. (”Invisibles” is my term for what other people call “lurkers,” but I don’t understand why there should be a negative connotation for people who only read websites, but none for people who never write letters to the editor or call TV stations to complain.) You “invisibles” are the ones I want to get a bead on, so I can continue to keep you around. And maybe get you to bring your friends along.

Let me tell you, it isn’t easy figuring out what you guys want when you never say a word. My mind-reading capabilities are taxed to their utmost in your cases.

First question: Seniority.

Next: Why you’re here.

Next: Who you are.

Next: Who are my Christian audience? (Please don’t take offense in any way, I’m just really, really curious about my demographics.)

Next: What kind of Jew are you?

Now, your politics:

Next: Why don’t you comment? (This is not for my regular commenters. Please skip this question.)

Next: What else would you like to see?

I know many of you are going to complain that some questions require more than one answer. I tried to make the answers varied enough so that you can choose one that’s at least close to what describes you. But if you insist, I can make multiple-choice answer polls for some of the questions, but not until a whole bunch of you have taken this poll.

You can cheat if you want to. All that will do is make me not bother to find out what my readers want in the future. Ruling by fiat. Yeah, I can deal with that. I’ve always had a hankering to be dictator of the world. If only.

My new hosting service is Bluehost, a service that I have been extremely happy with. Here’s the main reason why:

In the last month with my old hosting service, I received a link from Instapundit. The resulting traffic caused my old hosting service to redirect most of the referrers from Glenn away from my site. No, I am not kidding. They forced a redirect error to reduce server load. The traffic was only several hundred hits per hour, according to Sitemeter, but I can’t tell if that was before or after their little miracle cure.

Well, I am currently undergoing about twice the amount of traffic with another Instalink. As far as I can tell, my site is unaffected by the extra load, which is just under 1,000 hits per hour.

Another great service from Bluehost: If I can’t get to my site due to server load from someone else on the shared server, I can go to a page to check my server. Every time this has happened, within about a minute, the message is changed to “An administrator is checking the server load,” and shortly thereafter, my site is back to normal.

If you’re looking for a new hosting service, I’m recommending Bluehost. They don’t believe in ignoring their little guys and only making sure the big guns have excellent service. Big or little, they’re treated the same.

And no, I won’t name my old hosting service. I’d rather not play that game. I’m not going to get into a nasty blogwar. I’d much rather pay a compliment to Bluehost. They rock.

And thanks to a reader, I’ve just become a Bluehost affiliate. If you sign up through this link, I get cash.

And a banner.

Or maybe this one. I can’t decide.

Folks, I’m not downloading my email to the loaner computer, as I think it’s pretty much a waste of time and energy. What I’m doing is eliminating the spam on the server and moving my email into a waiting folder until I get my laptop back from HP.

If you have something important to tell me, you probably want to send it to me via my gmail account, which is my first name, a dot, my last name, and the usual second half of an email address.

Otherwise, you may as well just send it to me via paper airplane, because that’s about the speed I’m going to get my email.

By the way, you may not want to use the word “lottery” in any emails to me. I’ve decided to filter that one on the server level, joining “Taiwan” on the hit list. “Euro” is just about to go next, but I’m sure someone is eventually going to title an email to me “European blahblahblah,” so I’m holding off.

If you win the lottery, I’m simply never going to hear about it via email.

Tell you what: If you win the lottery, just let me know by hitting the tipjars with the biggest-ever contribution. I’m sure I’ll figure it out from there.

In other site news, I have noticed that not so many of you are watching the kitty movies. This does not mean I will cease making them. It simply means I’m not going to knock myself out getting them up every week. Every other week, probably, or depending on whether or not I’m in the mood to take a movie.

On the other hand, you may be missing some kick-ass commentary if you’re not watching the movies. My next commentary includes my foray into Latin. That’s right, Victor Davis Hanson isn’t the only blogger who can toss the Cicero-ball.

Now there’s an idea. Kitty movies with a Meryl commentary for background. Hm. I wonder if the podcasting world can stand it.

It is with great trepidation that I am shutting down the computer, removing my HD, and shipping this system off to HP.

I did a full backup (and verified it). I wrote down the passwords I’ll need.

I’m just worried about Murphy’s Law.

On my way to northern VA to pick up a loaner for the week. If you don’t hear from me, you’ll know why.

Today is my sixth blogiversary. What have six years of blogging brought me?

• Friends from all over the country and the world
• Words of encouragement
• A million and one jokes
• Veterinary advice
• Post and podcast ideas
• Job possibilities
• Actual jobs

On April 22nd, 2001, I became a blogger with no real idea of what I was doing, or how long I’d be doing it or, in fact, why I was doing it. It just felt right for the time.

Six years ago, I had no idea that I’d have readers from all over the world. Six years ago, I had no idea that I’d come to know so much about Israel and the world Jewish population. Six years ago, I had no idea I’d be voting for George W. Bush in 2004. Six years ago, I had no idea how big a part of my life this blog would become, or the influence it would have on my own life.

I have friends all over the world who I’ve only met via our blogs. I have friends who have come to visit me from all over the world, and who I know I can visit if I’m ever in their part of the world. I have a hunch that I could travel to every state in the nation and not need to spend a dime in hotel fees. Bloggers and blog readers are an extremely generous group of people.

When things are going badly in my life, my readers help me through the tough times. I get words of encouragement from people I’ve never met, but whom I’ve come to know and like. I have a friend I met via my blog who gives me everything from tax advice to proofreading to free legal advice. (And she’s a damned good friend, too.) Blogging got me a free consult with a small animal specialist when my regular vet was screwing up my cat’s diagnosis. My readers gave me and advice and comfort from cat lovers all over the world (thanks to Lair Simon for alerting the world of catbloggers, whose number are legion), not to mention hits on the tipjar (thanks, Hugh, for your steadfast presence there every single month).

Need posting ideas? Just wait for them to flood in. Need help on a podcast? Put up a post asking for song clips and within minutes, you’ve got ‘em. Need help answering a question on almost any topic? Ditto. Need a coblogger or three? Advertise. I haven’t met half of my cobloggers yet. I hope to someday have me them all.

When I moved to Richmond from New Jersey, I knew a total of one person: a friend that I met pre-blogging days. But even before I came to Richmond, Larry G., a regular reader, had emailed me and told me to get in touch with him when I came south. He and his wife are now among my closest friends, and his children call me Aunt Meryl. Oh. And now Sarah has a blog, too.

I am currently working a contracting job in northern Virginia that I got through Janet and Chris, two friends I met through my blog. We’d exchanged emails for a long time and finally met about two years ago (and Oh. My. God. do they have the coolest collection of ST memorabilia I have ever seen in my life). They helped me find kosher stores in the northern VA area to supplement the lame choices in the Richmond area. But even better, Janet had me come to their workplace for a meet-and-greet with their boss. That turned into a job a few weeks later that shows every sign of becoming permanent. So yes, blogging got me a job.

One of the best things that happened during my recent job search was finding that my blog doesn’t seem to make a difference to my prospective employers (the ones that actually Google my name and find it, that is—I was shocked at how few really do). I was never forced to make a choice between my blog and my job. I suppose I could give blogging up if I really had to, but it would leave a great, gaping hole in my life for a long time.

I ran a BBS for seven years before it petered out (due to the ascension of UseNet, CompuServe, AOL, GEnie, and the other precursors of blogging). I’m not seeing signs of tiring of this blog yet. I am feeling liike it’s time to make some kind of change again, but hey—go reread my first post. Life is change.

Here’s to six more, and then six more, and then six more….

The previous blogiversary posts:
First anniversary post
Second anniversary post
Third anniversary post
Fourth anniversary post
Fifth anniversary post