To Our Readers

When we started this site two and a half years ago, the Trunk said: “The idea that we could ever have any readers for this thing is a pathetic fantasy.” This was after a decade or so of punditry, in which we had published articles in dozens of newspapers and magazines. Fortunately, the Trunk was wrong, and our traffic has grown steadily–in fact, exponentially. The latest surge is due, obviously, to Rathergate, but it continues a trend of ever-increasing traffic that goes back to the site’s inception. And we can’t help noting that if we hadn’t already had tens of thousands of readers who responded to the Trunk’s appeal for information about CBS’s forged documents, the Rather bump never would have happened.
Still, we have had to make adjustments to the ever-increasing traffic. Currently, we are getting around 100,000 hits per day, which places us fourth in the Truth Laid Bear traffic rankings, either first or second among conservative sites, depending on whether you think InstaPundit is conservative.
Because of the constantly growing traffic, we were suffering from slow downloads for a while. A few days ago, our excellent host, Hosting Matters, moved us to a new, dedicated server, which seems to have solved those problems.
Along with increasing traffic has come an ever-growing volume of emails. Currently, we are receiving around one email, on the average, every two minutes. We’re not complaining; we love to hear from our readers, and we get lots of our best stuff from readers via email. But if you do some quick math, you can appreciate that it is hard for us to read all of our email, let alone answer it or follow up on it. We do the best we can, but while we try to read all the emails we receive, we can only respond to a small percentage.
What bothers me is that we get a lot of emails that we really, really want to answer: from college students, from new bloggers trying to follow in our footsteps, from people trying to learn about the internet, from readers who have a great idea they want us to publicize. We try to answer as many of these emails as we can, and follow up on as many as possible, but inevitably some fall between the cracks. So if you have sent us an email that you really wanted an answer to, but haven’t heard from us, please forgive us: we’re doing the best we can. But don’t stop writing us, as we need input from our readers and hopefully next time we’ll be able to get back to you.
With our increasing traffic, sales at the Power Line store have been booming. You may want to check it out; after all, if you’re going to wear a t-shirt anyway, it may as well say Power Line. Lots of pretty girls are wearing them. Generally speaking, the Cafe Press merchandise is nice. The only questionable item is the baseball caps; the caps themselves are good quality, but the reproduction of the PL logo is a little muddy. Anyway, check out the store. If there are any Cafe Press items we aren’t carrying that you’d like to see, let us know and we’ll add them.
Also, take a look at the Blogad advertisers on the left side of the page. They’re all politically compatible, except for one mystery ad by the DNC which we can’t figure out–the link doesn’t seem to go anywhere–so we figured we might as well take their $100. I would especially note the Kona “Blogger Coffee” ad. The owners of the plantation are solid conservatives and denizens of the blogosphere, and they make a phenomenally good–albeit expensive–coffee. It’s even kosher. I was in Hawaii for the first time a few months ago, en route to Japan on business, and was struck by how good the coffee was. It’s an American product, and it has all of the flavor you want without the scorched aftertaste typical of contemporary coffees. If you can afford it, you should try it.
So — thanks again to our readers, and keep those emails coming.

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