On June 28, 2004 Billmon made his Last Call:
So, very reluctantly, I’ve decided to turn Whiskey Bar into a commentless blog – just me and my occasional thoughts, there for anybody to read, but not for everybody to come along and throw in their two cents.
Two days later Moon of Alabama opened.
The first commentators were: teuton, SusanG, Mushinronsha, ck, FLASHHARRY, Juannie, Fran, Dan of Steele, remembereringgiap, Possum and Helpful Spook.
Another two days later I claimed:
There is no personal interest of mine to run this site, other than to discuss Billmon’s posts and current political/economic/philosophical issues. Authoring and moderation on this site will be shared.
That statement is still operative, though the sharing part lacks some volunteers.
Some hard times came last August after Billmon stopped posting. I tried to keep the site up and the community alive by posting a piece a day, but the emotional toll was too high and by the end of November, I planed to shut it down. Thankfully Jérôme took over much of the workload and I had time to recover. In the end, we did not agree about where to take the site and Jérôme is off to run a place better suited for his style.
Now, as Billmon is back to full productivity, I am cutting back on posting. I will jump in once a while and everybody is still invited to send her/his pieces to be posted here to: MoonofA at aol dot com. (You are of course also invited to send some Malt to fill up my bar.)
For now, I will keep the site up, but my work-life will change the next months and I may have to cut back the time spend here or find some other solution.
Anyhow, thanks to everybody who passes by and special warm thanks and hugs to the regular commentators. You are the folks who really keep this site going. And the biggest thank you goes to Billmon, who keeps inspiring us all.
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Some (not 100% reliable) statistics about Moon of Alabama as of this morning:
Total Posts: 882
Total Comments: 28,925
Total Visits: 194,500
Total Pageviews: 534,500
Average Visit Duration: 6.6 minutes
Average Pageview Duration: 2.2 minutes
Total Time Spend Reading and Commenting (est.): 19,600 hours
Money spent to run MoA: US$ 230
Time spent to run MoA (est.): >1,000 hours
Current Averages (last three weeks)
Visits per Day: 1,100
Pageviews per Day: 3,300
Comments per Day: 80
Bandwidth Usage: 5.5 Gigabyte per Month, 55 kilobyte per pageview
Blocked Spam Addresses: 25
Visitor Operation Systems: 80% Windows, 15% Mac, 5% Linux
Visitor Browsers: 46% IE, 38% Mosaic/Firefox/Netscape, 11% Safari, 5% Opera/Others
You can follow some of the above stats here.