Today is Logarchism’s first birth­day. So it’s time for a bit of navel gazing.

A year ago, when we opted to head out on our own, we had no idea what to expect. Would we be able to retain our read­er­ship? Would we be able to grow it? How would we estab­lish our brand and our rhythm?

It’s a year later, and we’ve learned many lessons along the way.

Pol­i­tics is a boom and bust busi­ness. There was plenty going on in 2010, and late in 2011. Early 2011, not so much.

There’s a del­i­cate bal­ance between adver­tis­ing rev­enue and traf­fic sup­port. We could make enough in adver­tis­ing to sup­port the traf­fic we had, but if we had a sud­den spike in traf­fic, the servers can’t han­dle the load, and every­thing comes tum­bling down. On the other hand, if we paid for enough capac­ity to han­dle all spikes, adver­tis­ing rev­enue wouldn’t begin to pay for the ser­vice. That’s how it is at the uncom­fort­able traf­fic level of Log­a­rchism. It’s sort of like being in that uncom­fort­able point where a city is too dense to sup­port every­one dri­ving alone in cars, but not quite dense enough to sup­port high-​​quality pub­lic transit.

Hav­ing a clever image on your site can gen­er­ate a ton of traf­fic. But the traf­fic gen­er­ated comes from other peo­ple putting your graphic on their sites with img tags. You get to pay for the traf­fic and server load, but you don’t get any of the ben­e­fit. The corol­lary to this is: it’s rude to use an img tag to point to some­one else’s graphic unless they ask you to. The sec­ondary les­son here is that you can (and we now do) pre­vent such cross-​​domain image use.

No mat­ter how hard you try, it’s impos­si­ble to develop con­sis­tent rules for mod­er­a­tion. In the end, we’re left with Jus­tice Pot­ter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” def­i­n­i­tion. It’s also very hard to apply Jus­tice Stewart’s def­i­n­i­tion with­out a degree of con­fir­ma­tion bias.

Writ­ing a min­i­mum of two arti­cles a week, every week, is a lot of work. It’s even harder when it’s not your day job. It’s espe­cially hard when it requires research and explo­ration of theories.

So here we are, at the 758^th post on Log­a­rchism. We’ve had well over 28,000 com­ments accu­mu­late here. Tens of thou­sands of peo­ple have been here. Unsur­pris­ingly, over 90 per­cent come from the United States, but we have been vis­ited by 136 countries.

Most of all, Log­a­rchism is far more than the three reg­u­lar authors. The com­ments sec­tion com­prises about 70% of the value of the site. That means this site is being dri­ven more by those who com­ment than by those who post. The more of you that get involved, the bet­ter we all are. Thank you all for your con­tri­bu­tions over the past year. We look for­ward to more as we approach the Pres­i­den­tial election.