OTB crossed the 29 million unique visitor mark, as measured by SiteMeter, early this afternoon. As always, thanks to all who visit, link, and comment.

OTB crossed the 28 million unique visitor mark, as measured by SiteMeter, some time Thursday.  As always, thanks to all who visit, link, and comment.

WordPress now supports Gravatars organically (a function of Automaticc, the parent company of the former, having acquired the latter) so I’ve had OTB’s comments section tweaked to support them. So, go sign up for a free one if you want to have a distinguishing logo displayed next to your comments. (Gravatars are populated based on [...]

For some odd reason, the front page of OTB is not rendering yet it’s accessible through individual archive pages.  More oddly, the latter is only true in Internet Explorer; Firefox isn’t loading anything. My two tech guys are out and about (it’s Sunday afternoon) and I’ve exhausted my own skills here so it’s wait and [...]

We’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.5 but are having some minor plug-in compatibility issues that are being worked through. If you’re seeing problems, please note them in the comments below.

OTB hit the 27 million unique visitor mark, as measured by SiteMeter, earlier this afternoon. Thanks as always to those who visit, link, and comment.

OTB hit the 26 million unique visitor mark as measured by Sitemeter sometime overnight. Thanks as always to those who visit, link, and comment.

My apologies to those who’ve been trying unsuccessfully all day to access the site. My hosting company turned routine hardware maintenance into an adventure which required complete restoration of the site from their own managed backup. This resulted in not only eight hours of downtime but the complete loss of all posts and comments from [...]

OTB hit the 25 million unique visitor mark as measured by Sitemeter sometime shortly after midnight. I installed the counter on February 4, 2003 (five days into OTB’s run) so it took a little over five years to reach that total. Thanks as always to those who visit, link, and comment.

My first post* at Outside the Beltway was at 9:47 the morning of January 31, 2003. If my math is right, that was five years ago. When I started this thing, the blogosphere was in its infancy, with most of the big political sites no more than a year or two old. There were still [...]

OTB passed the 24 million unique visitor, as measured by SiteMeter, sometime yesterday. We’ve been at it since 31 January 2003 and installed the counter the next week. Thanks to all who visit, comment, and link.

Kim and I are headed to Aruba to spend the Christmas holidays, returning the 27th. If all goes according to plan, we will be in the air by the time this posts. I’ll have Internet access in the room and will do some blogging and checking for high priority emails while we’re away but my [...]

OTB’s Campaign 2008 coverage will be featured on Newsweek.com’s new Ruckus group blog. Media Bloggers Association president Robert Cox has the details: Media Bloggers Association (MBA) and Newsweek have launched “The Ruckus,” a new group blog about politics for Newsweek.com. The blog will feature posts from nine MBA-member bloggers about the presidential campaign on a [...]

OTB passed the 23 million unique visitor mark on SiteMeter overnight. Thanks to all who visit, comment, and link.

Bruce McQuain ran Q&O through an Internet widget and found that the site was written at the College Undergraduate level. Curious, I did the same for OTB. To my chagrin, we apparently write like high schoolers around here. Considering that all the site authors have graduate degrees, that was a bit disconcerting. Out of curiosity, [...]

OTB passed the 22 million unique visitor account as measured by SiteMeter earlier this morning. As always, thanks to all who visit, comment, and link.

The “Recent Comments” feed in the left sidebar seems rather flaky and frequently goes down. If it’s facilitating discussion and making people more interested in engaging the comments, I’m willing to invest in getting that fixed. If not, I’m inclined to scrap it. How many of you pay any attention to it and find it [...]

I’m starting a new chapter in my professional career this morning, having been hired as the managing editor for the Atlantic Council of the United States. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be working with CEO Fred Kempe and the senior leadership of the Council in relaunching their Web presence. I’m excited about the opportunity [...]

The site woes continue, as the transition to the new server ran into some unexpected snags. Mark hopes to have things transitioned tomorrow morning. My apologies for the inconvenience. UPDATE (Sept. 8): Okay, so it’s late afternoon. The site’s moved, although there may be continued wonkiness while the domain nameservers port and the inevitable bugs [...]

Per Steven Taylor‘s suggestion, I’m trying out Word 2007′s blog posting feature.

My apologies for the numerous site outages and odd mySQL error messages over the past few days. Unfortunately, OTB Media has outgrown its dedicated server. I have entered into an agreement with Rackspace for a much more robust multi-server system. Mark Jaquith will be porting everything over the next couple of days. Please bear with [...]

Our server is having some problems that caused an outage from some time around 1 a.m. Eastern until 10:20 or so. There’s still some work to be done but we’re hoping that we’ll be able to stay up while that’s happening. Regular posting to resume shortly.

OTB passed the 21 million unique visitor account as measured by SiteMeter sometime yesterday evening. As always, thanks to all who visit, comment, and link.

Rodney Dill noticed yesterday afternoon that OTB had passed the 20 million unique visitor account as measured by SiteMeter. That’s about 19,900,000 more than I’d have ever expected when I started this site in January 2003. As always, thanks to all who visit, comment, and link.

After a few days of very low numbers owing to Feedburner’s inability to poll Activeweave Stickis statistics, OTB has gone over the 10,000 RSS feed subscriber mark for the first time. How much of this is owing to more actual readers versus changes in counting methodology I haven’t a clue. Still, it strikes me as [...]

OTB’s syndication feed had been steadily marching toward 10,000 subscribers as of yesterday. Today, it’s down considerably: Was it something I said?

OTB passed the 19 million unique visitor mark, as counted by SiteMeter, earlier this hour. As always, thanks to all who visit, comment, and link.

OTB has undergone a facelift as part of a forthcoming re-launch of OTB Media. Please submit any bug reports in the comments below. UPDATE: Does anyone use the social media icons in the post footer to submit blog posts? Or is everyone now using browser tools and other methods for that? UPDATE: Ed and I [...]

We got back from Italy yesterday afternoon and my regular blogging schedule will resume shortly. Thanks to Steven Taylor for his guest blogging while I was away.

I’m headed to Tuscany with my wife and another couple for two weeks. I hope to have at least limited Internet connectivity and to check in and post occasionally but I’ll be in extreme vacation mode until June 8th. I’ll scan my email messages when I can but responses will be sporadic. The regular co-authors [...]

I’m pleased to announce that I have lured C. Dodd Harris, Esq. out of blogging retirement and persuaded him to join the staff at OTB. His blog, ipse dixit, was a fixture of the blogosphere when I started OTB in January 2003 and was going strong until he abruptly shut it down in the summer [...]

Terry Oglesby wonders, “Have any of the rest of you noticed a sudden upturn or downturn since mid-April in visitors referred by Google?” Indeed, I have, on both OTB Prime and Gone Hollywood (although, oddly, OTB Sports is seeing its highest traffic ever). Terry’s suspicion, that “Google had redone their search protocols to highlight or [...]

Over the past couple of weeks, I have had pop-up ads minimize my browser window and tell me that my computer was infected and urging me to run a virus scanning program I didn’t have. There are several variations, but I captured this one over the weekend: This has happened to me maybe five or [...]

The folks at Technorati quietly implemented a change to their metrics that has ignited quite a buzz in the blogosphere. Dorion Carroll explains: On Fri. May 4th, we updated Technorati.com to include the Technorati Authority for blogs listed on the Blog page and in search results. This update changed the earlier references of “N blogs [...]

Congratulations to Mark Jaquith, who got married last evening to the lovely Sarah Macy. Mark’s life has been quite a rollercoaster of late, with the thrill and aggravations of home ownership, a heart wrenching personal tragedy, and wedding planning all compressed into a little over three months. Here’s hoping the ride continues in an upward [...]

I’ve been interviewed at One Blog A Day. As the name implies, he interviews on blogger every weekday.

OTB hit the 18 million unique visitor mark, as measured by SiteMeter since 4 February 2003, a couple hours ago. Thanks to all who visit, comment, and link.

I’m flying out to Los Angeles today to take part in the Knight New Media Center’s seminar “Election ‘08: Covering Politics in Cyberspace” at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication. I’ll be joining Media Bloggers Association president Robert Cox and John Amato of Crooks and Liars on a panel tomorrow afternoon. I’ll get some blogging in [...]

The site’s been wonky and intermittently down since around 7 Eastern this morning. Ed Burns has been working on it for a bit and narrowed it down to the Apache server getting a ridiculously high load but hasn’t been able to pin it down any further. UPDATE: Ed has managed to restore stability.

OTB hit the 17 million unique visitor mark, as measured by SiteMeter since 4 February 2003, late yesterday. Thanks to all who visit, link, and comment.

I added the Snap Preview Anywhere feature, which provides thumbnails of linked websites upon mousing over the link, to the site about a month ago because I’d seen it elsewhere and liked it. A couple of readers complained about it this afternoon, so I’ve added a badge after the ads in the left sidebar that [...]

OTB had its 16th million visitor, as measured by SiteMeter, in the wee hours of the night. Thanks as always to those who visit, comment, and link.

Jim Henley promises to play the “Look Through Your March 2003 Archives” game over the weekend. I decided to go ahead and do it now. OTB was in its infancy then, having started January 31st. It was then a solo-author blog, featuring yours truly at his most prolific. (It was also on BlogSpot, but the [...]

OTB passed this 14 million unique visitor mark as measured by SiteMeter sometime overnight. Thanks as always to those who visit, comment, and link.

Kim and I are in Minnesota visiting friends so blogging will be light on my end this weekend. Hopefully, my co-bloggers will find something interesting to write about.

Matthew Yglesias has not only been proudly eponymous since 2002, he has had his own Facebook fan club (“Matthew Yglesias is kinda awesome“) since last summer. This is all the rage among lefty bloggers, with Talking Points Memo (TPM Fans) and MyDD (MyDD People) following suit. Indeed, Matt Stoller alleges that “everybody’s doing it.” Not [...]

OTB turned four last Wednesday. I usually remember such things but between the California trip and work on an outside writing project, it slipped my mind. My first post* at Outside the Beltway was at 9:37 a.m. on Friday, January 31, 2003. This is my 14,368th post. My co-authors and guest bloggers have added another [...]

OTB passed this 14 million unique visitor mark as measured by SiteMeter during the 8 o’clock hour Pacific Time. Thanks as always to those who visit, comment, and link.

I’ll be blogging from California this week, so my posting schedule may be off a bit. My wife has to handle some business for her firm’s Hermosa Beach branch the next few days, so we flew out last night. We’re here through Thursday and then head down to San Diego through Saturday for a little [...]

Andrew Olmsted concludes his discussion on the recent blogospheric meme about whether people who opposed the Iraq War for the wrong reasons deserve any credit with a formulation that is both correct and amusingly Rumsfeldian: Some people were right about Iraq for the wrong reasons. Some were wrong for the right reasons. Some were right [...]