I started this blog on July 17, 2004 and for the first five weeks or so I didn't have a counter on it. In that time I took the bar, went on vacation and didn't do all that much with it. Then, on August 23, 2004, I put a counter on the site and started keeping track of how many people stop by. The last couple years on this date, I've mentioned what the site traffic has been. I'll do the same today. Let the navel gazing begin!

I don't have a lot of time to ramble on right now as we are closing on our house today and I've been busy getting ready for the move. But let me give you a little bit of information.

My stat counter program tracks page hits and unique visitors. It does a good job distinguishing between bots and real live visitors, so I'm pretty confident that the page hit totals are reasonably accurate. I'm not as confident about the unique visitor totals, but I have a reasonable confidence in them and they've been a reference for the last three years.

Between August 23, 2006 and the end August 22, 2007, there were 456,822 page hits at the WGOM and 154,359 unique visitors. That represents a pretty substantial increase over the year before (227,681 and 102,445). The largest month in terms of both page hits and unique visitors has been July 2007, with 58,629 page hits and 17,065 visitors. That record won't last long, as I expect August to be just shy of 70,000 page hits and over 20,000 visitors. With just a little ciphering you can figure out that we are averaging over 2200 page hits a day for the month (and 700 visitors).

Year to date, we've had 328,588 page views and 109,607 visitors. That's more page views than in all of 2006.

A little bit about content before I make a few closing remarks. There were 1,433 articles posted in the last 365 days. That's pretty freaking incredible. That's an average of 3.92 posts per day. Last year at this time, I wanted a post for people to have an open chat about whatever they wanted, and I came up with the Cup of Coffee idea. Then, I found the Berenguer Boogie video and decided to incorporate music videos on the site. YouTube has a wealth of great stuff and I really like that feature. Plus, finding a template that would accommodate the video like this one does was a big deal. In the off season, I'm going to do some tinkering with the site to fix some of the problems that came with this template.

One of the best decisions I made about this site was to invite others to post. The site would have died without all of you. Here's a little tally of number of posts in the last 365 days.

Yeah, I posted over half of the entries (and a lot of those were Cups of Coffee), but think of it, this site had 548 "guest" postings over the last year. That is a tremendous number and to me it represents a real investment in this little site by a lot of people who enjoy coming here. I changed the site name to SBG Nation for a reason -- because of all the hard work that a lot of people have put in to make this a fun place to hang out. Thanks to all of you, (especially BabySBG!).

There have been over 50,000 "Letters to the Editor" posted in the last 365 days. I find that to be a tremendous number, way more than I would have ever expected. Last year, I was excited about 13,000. The site does lose a little readership in the off-season, but there'll still be a Cup of Coffee ready every single day for some conversation. Jeff A, keep us up to date on former Twins! I have never, ever contemplated a policy for comments. I have the right to delete comments and I have deleted a ton of spam (that's not part of the 50,000). I also deleted two comments in the last year by a user that I know personally -- not because the comments were abusive, profane, argumentative or anything like that. He posted some information about himself that I thought best be kept private, so I removed them. It's possible that I'll delete comments in the future, I don't know. But, I'm not anticipating that.

Some sites enforce strict comment policies to keep comments on topic. You'll see that in larger trafficked sites. I suppose that things can get out of control and they want their sites, on which they work hard, not to be overrun by yahoos. I can understand that, but by that time, it's probably too late. For some reason, though, our little corner of the world hasn't had that problem. I think it's because a lot of people who stop by are visiting. Sometimes, a good visit veers off into different directions -- beer, food, the Bible, kids, college (whether you are in it now or twenty years ago), music. This site is about more than baseball, so feel free to talk about whatever.

I'd like to thank Aaron Gleeman and Seth Stohs, who are primarily responsible for a good portion of you finding this site. Those two guys have been very good to SBG Nation and link here frequently. I appreciate their continued support. There are other sites that link here and I don't mean to slight them, but those two people really put butts in the seats.

Finally, thanks to all of you for stopping by. It's been fun. I hope to see a bunch of you at the SBG Nation Convention (details coming soon).