According to our site stats, Scott’s post this morning, “Michael Ramirez—Call Your Office,” was Power Line’s 40,000th post since the start of the site in 2002.
According to our archives, this was the very first post from May 2002:
Notwithstanding the political ads, this place is pretty idyllic. Maybe it only lasts for a few days at the end of May, but if you’re trying to approximate Eden, check out northeastern South Dakota.
Maybe there are some before this that haven’t survived the format changes and archiving process, but John and Scott will have to tell us. ( I do have a distinct memory of emailing Scott about how this whole “blogging” thing worked, and how you formatted a comment. That was back in the day when you had to know a lot of coding to make it all work.)
I had thought of starting to compile a “Best of Power Line” series, or maybe even a Power Line eBook, but when I saw how many posts we’d have to go through, it clearly became an impossible task. (Anyone want to be a Power Line intern?)
Now on to 80,000!
SCOTT adds: Lev Grossman’s December 2004 Time article reports that the first post to appear on the site was John’s: “This is a new blog dedicated to current events and any topics that are of interest to me.”
JOHN adds: The “me” quickly became “us,” as Scott joined the site within a few days. We had already been writing partners for over a decade by 2002. Paul joined a few months later; Steve is the relative newcomer, and relative youngster. The scariest thing about those early days is that pre-Joe Malchow, I was the site’s technical “expert.” I recall finding an image of a power line to decorate the earliest site, then on Blogger.
We don’t have records going all the way back to the beginning, but we have been on Google Analytics since 2006 and can estimate the time before that. Over the years, we have gotten somewhat more than a half billion page views. Most days I feel pretty confident that we will still be around for a billion, although we won’t know just when that happens.
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