Here's the periodic State of the Blog address. We're looking at about 10,000 page views for July, which is about what we had in May and June. That's a lot more than we had at the beginning of the year, but it's down from our peak of about 15,000 a month for March and April. Not bad. I am assuming there's been a general fall of blog readership from the height of the Iraq War, since there's less news happening now. We've got about 60 inbound blogroll links, more than we've ever had; on N. Z. Bear's Blogosphere Ranking chart, we're now classified as "Marauding Marsupials". We'll never be "Higher Beings", but it's nice to at least have made the Mammalia class. Our major sources of readers from blogroll links are InstaPundit, by far, and Samizdata.

I'm not sure I've given the guys at Samizdata, the British libertarian blog, any props recently, but they deserve large quantities thereof. Samizdata was the first major blog to blogroll us, to link to our material, and to provide us with encouragement, all the way back in February 2002 when we were just getting started on the old Homestead site. Patrick Crozier, one of the Samizdata mob, was both the first person to send us positive e-mail and the guy who set up this Blogger website for us--we're so computer-illiterate that we wouldn't have been able to figure it out ever. In their honor, we've tried to be generous about adding links to our blogroll--we try to link every blog we come across that we like, and we especially try to blogroll good blogs that are just starting out. If you've got a blog and we haven't linked you, let us know and we'll probably do it.