Thanks to my webmaster

I've just made my 500th blog entry this year. It's been an exciting run; checking out my visitor stats, my biggest single day was June 3 when I live-blogged Mark Steyn's trial, and had 47,000 page loads in 24 hours. I didn't have my stats program in place for the first three days after I uploaded my YouTube videos back in January, and I suspect those were busy days, too.

I forgot to mark the one millionth unique visitor to my site, which happened a couple of months ago. I'm pleased that the site typically gets five to ten thousand unique visitors a day, depending on what I write about -- and who links to me! I find it encouraging that about half of my daily visitors are the "usual suspects" -- according to my stats package, they're return visitors, some of whom have visited my site as many as 300 times.

I think I know why: they want to know how the story is going to end.

Will Canada shuck off its politically correct human rights commissions, and re-embrace our heritage of freedom? Or will we continue to slouch into the soft tyranny of state censorship? I feel optimistic about how things are going in the court of public opinion, but we still haven't seen any meaningful actions from legislators.

What the courts will do is an interesting question -- especially in the wake of a recent liberty-oriented ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada. But that kind of reform is too slow for me.

I decided to pop by my YouTube page to check those stats, too. I haven't uploaded any videos there since January, but the site still has momentum, clocking up to 500 new views a day. YouTube has added a statistics program of its own, which includes demographic information like age, sex and geographical location of my viewers. My typical YouTuber is a 45-year-old male from Canada. That sounds about right.

My blog hasn't just been a way for me to spread my ideas; it's been a great feedback device. According to my comment software, Haloscan, my reader comments have increased from 1,500/month in January to more than 3,000/month in June. I think that's great -- and I try to let as many comments on as I can, though I do delete a few that could cause me unneccesary grief in my various court cases.

Needless to say, without the generous support of my readers, I'd have been roadkill by now. Only through the combination of the blog, YouTube and PayPal have I been able to survive the onslaught of "lawfare" that has been waged against me, first by radical Muslims like Syed Soharwardy and the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities, and then by the permanent human rights commission industry. I imagine that I'd have been crushed by now by their many legal actions had this all happened to me ten or even five years ago. George Orwell wondered if technology would enslave us or liberate us; in my case, it's saved me from would-be tyrants. So far, at least!

This is a good time for me to acknowledge with thanks my volunteer webmaster, who has helped me these past six months with everything from providing the camera which shot those now famous videos, to helping me upload them to YouTube, to setting up my Google Adsense and generally fixing what sometimes goes wrong in a busy blog. Stephen Taylor, the co-founder of the Blogging Tories, has helped me out since January without any compensation -- or even any public thanks. His knowledge and expertise have helped immensely with taking this content and using the social media tools of the Internet to find a huge audience. Stephen's the kind of guy I can contact at 3 a.m., and he's always happy to help. Here’s how to get in touch with Stephen if you have some PR work that needs doing in a smart, Web 2.0 way. I’m sure he'd make a killing if he ever went into the PR business – I just hope he keeps doing his work for "the cause", too!