DCDL

Today is the first anniversary of the inaugural post on this blog. In the succeeding 12 months, we’ve had 295 posts and 418 comments (not counting the more than 1,000 spam comments, few of which have penetrated our formidable spam defenses), and these are our 20 most read blog posts during that year:

1. Freedom Walk Description Changes (August 15): the first of a series obsessively tracking the Pentagon’s Freedom Walk site (far and away the most read post because it was linked by Atrios)
2. Bizarre Smear Campaign in Ward 3 (November 5): a report on an odd local political campaign
3. The Next Nuagmire (January 14): a little joke about a serious thing
4. Our Liberal Media (September 26): one of many examinations of bias in the Washington Post
5. Post Wants Democratic Surrender on Social Security (October 31): highlighting a Washington Post editorial asking Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on Social Security
6. The DLC Rises Again (July 26): ranting about the Republican wing of the Democratic Party
7. HUD Joins Freedom Walk Promotion (September 7): further word about the Freedom Walk, and the pressuring of government employees to participate
8. Milquetoast Democrats Strike Again (July 23): criticism of wimps in the Senate
9. A Skunk at the Freedom Walk Party (August 30): an alert about anti-everything religious wacko Fred Phelps’s attendance at the Freedom Walk
10. Glenn Reynolds, Supergenius (March 20): a bit of fun at the expense of Instapundit
11. Where Is Home? (July 10): recognition of the Poor Man’s ridicule of the flypaper strategy
12. Separated at Birth? (October 6): a suggestion about who should play Judith Miller in the Plame movie
13. Cillizza Strikes Again (November 29): more Post criticism, focusing on the blogger of “The Fix”
14. Bush Diagnosed With Abramoffoma (February 12): the first photo of the president with the most famous lobbyist in the country
15. It’s All About Dubya (August 15): one of a series on the character defects of Bush and others in his administration
16. Where Are the Slimers? (October 26): idle speculation about the Republican smear machine
17. Webb Enters Virginia Senate Race (February 8): an announcement about a promising challenger to George Allen, which now ranks very high in results for popular Google searches like “Virginia Senate race”
18. Cillizza Update (December 8): more on Cillizza
19. Ready, Aim, Sing! (October 3): introduction to the Right Brothers, a Bush-supporting musical group who surprisingly are not a parody
20. Rule of Law (October 21): an explanation of Republicans’ idea that laws apply to everyone but them

Or I suppose I should say “annyong haseyo!” Since Friday we’ve been having a flurry of people visiting this site from google.co.kr or daum.net (another Korean search site), or using Google to translate the front page into Korean, so I figured I’d put up a message for our new visitors.

You’re all searching for “DCDL”, so I assume there’s something going on in Korea at the moment related to something called DCDL, but I doubt you’re looking for DC-based political blog written by regulars at Drinking Liberally. Perhaps you’re looking for Digital Control Design Language? Design Constraints Description Language? Driver-Controlled Differential Lock? Digitally Controllable Delay Line? District of Columbia Debate League? Data Collection and Dissemination Lab? Double-Current Data Logger? Delaware County District Library? Dallas Cowboys Discussion List? Dolnośląskie Centrum Diagnostyki Laboratoryjnej (which has dcdl.pl)? Maybe not.

In any case, I apologize for the disappointment. Feel free to leave a comment letting us know what it’s all about or pointing your compatriots to more satisfactory site for whatever it is you’re looking for.

Here are some local events that you might be interested in. I’m still working on the event calendar (linked from the sidebar), which may be changing drastically before long. If you know of an event that should be included, let me know at keith@dcdl.org, or post a comment.

Monday, January 9

• Sierra Club Happy Hour

Tuesday, January 10

• John Perkins book signing — Confessions of an Economic Hitman

Wednesday, January 11

• Drinking Liberally
• Hands On DC Happy Hour
• Nonprofit Networking Happy Hour

Thursday, January 12

• Drinking Liberally (with Ezra Klein)

Saturday, January 14

• Running for Change
• Peace Vigil at Capitol

These announcements are not endorsements of the organizations mentioned.

It’s the end of the year, and the DCDL blog has been around for nearly seven months now, so I thought I’d do a little analysis. We’ve had 219 posts and 320 nonspam comments (plus more than 500 spam comments, almost none of which have penetrated our formidable spam defenses), and these are our ten most read blog posts for the year:

1. Freedom Walk Description Changes (August 15): the first of a series obsessively tracking the Pentagon’s Freedom Walk site (far and away the most read post because it was linked by Atrios)
2. Bizarre Smear Campaign in Ward 3 (November 5): a report on an odd local political campaign
3. Our Liberal Media (September 26): one of many examinations of bias in the Washington Post
4. HUD Joins Freedom Walk Promotion (September 7): further word about the Freedom Walk, and the pressuring of government employees to participate
5. The DLC Rises Again (July 26): ranting about the Republican wing of the Democratic Party
6. Milquetoast Democrats Strike Again (July 23): criticism of wimps in the Senate
7. Separated at Birth? (October 6): a side-by-side comparison of Judith Miller and her actress twin
8. Where Is Home? (July 10): recognition of the Poor Man’s ridicule of the flypaper strategy
9. A Skunk at the Freedom Walk Party (August 30): an alert about anti-everything religious wacko Fred Phelps’s attendance at the Freedom Walk
10. Where Are the Slimers? (October 26): idle speculation about the Republican smear machine

Here are some local events that you might be interested in. I’m putting together an event calendar (linked from the sidebar), which is currently rather ugly but will be evolving. If you know of an event that should be included, let me know at keith@dcdl.org.

Monday, December 5

• Alternative Gift Fair Happy Hour, co-sponsored by DCDL
• Arlington Drinking Liberally

Tuesday, December 6

• Hands On DC Happy Hour
• Paul Hackett Fundraiser
• Montgomery County Progressive Alliance

Wednesday, December 7

• Drinking Liberally (with Matt Stoller)
• Sierra Club Holiday Party
• DC for Democracy
• Adrian Fenty’s Birthday Party

Thursday, December 8

• Drinking Liberally Holiday Party (With Patrick Gavin)

Saturday, December 10

• Capital Action Clothing Drive

These announcements are not endorsements of the organizations or candidates mentioned.

Via Crooked Timber, I see that Creek Running North has declared today Lurker Day, so DCDL is joining. If you don’t know what a lurker is, you probably are one, since lurkers (the term is not derogatory) are people — the majority of blog readers — who read posts but never make comments. If you’re reading this, please make a comment and tell us who you are, why you read DCDL, how you found us, or whatever you want to say. And if you’re in the DC area, join us tonight at Timberlake’s, 1726 Connecticut Avenue NW (north of Dupont Circle) starting at 6:30.

Happy Lurker Day!

David Alpert, the webmaster for Drinking Liberally, has a post on his blog (and on the Cosmopolity blog) about bloggers starting DL groups and then about DL groups starting blogs:

The ideas and energy have often flowed in the other direction as well, from drinkosphere to blogosphere; liberal drinkers from Williamsburg, Brooklyn to Washington, DC started their own blogs, prompting the drinkingliberally.org Web team (i.e. me) to deploy a blog system on our server for chapters like Louisville and Cambridge, Mass.

So we played a small part in the birth of the DL blog system, which currently hosts blogs for five chapters:

• Oakland, California
• Louisville, Kentucky
• Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Princeton, New Jersey
• New York City (Park Slope)

Except for the Park Slope blog, which may not have gotten off the ground yet, they all seem pretty active. Check them out to see what DLers are blogging about in other parts of the country.

Yesterday was an exciting day for dcdl.org. Late Monday, shortly before midnight, I e-mailed Atrios about my post on the changes to the Freedom Walk site. Within minutes, he linked it from his site, and the traffic started coming.

For some reason, no one (that Google knows about) has used the word “Atriolanche” before, though “Instalanche” is of course very common and “Kosalanche” has occurred a few times. During the next 24 hours dcdl.org experienced more traffic than it had during the previous two months of its existence (which isn’t saying that much, since traffic has been pretty low):

“Visits” is an estimate of the number of times people visited the site (counting the same person twice if they visited again after a long wait). “Pages” is the number of web pages viewed. “Hits” is the total number of web requests made, including graphics and other components as well as HTML pages.

More than 10,000 people have downloaded the article now, and some of them have probably even read it. Things are much quieter today, but not quite back to our normal level, and we did get linked from a handful of other blogs. So a few more people know about us now.

Today dcdl.org was mentioned in The Examiner. Okay, it’s a free paper, and maybe it’s not exactly liberal, but we take what we can get. As it turns out, the mention was in an editorial, “Scott McClinton”, that reproduced (badly) the table of repeated phrases from my “Analyzing the ScottBot” post of last week. Notice how they cleverly insert a jab at Clinton into their criticism of Bush — actually I guess it’s really just criticism of Scott McClellan. Still, it’s nice to be appreciated.

Speaking of fame and this blog, you may have noticed that we could use another blogger or two here. If you’re a semiregular (or at least an occasional) at DCDL gatherings and you’d like to contribute to the blog, leave a comment here, e-mail me (keith@dcdl.org), or find one of us at Timberlake’s Thursday.

Well, Cory has officially announced the site on the e-mail list (be sure to subscribe if you haven’t), and I see from the logs that a few people have been visiting as a result. We’ve also had a few visitors coming from Technorati, and one person in France who searched Google for “dcdl” (I don’t know what they were looking for, but somehow I doubt we were it, although we have rocketed into the #1 position for that search, beating out all the pages about Digital Control Design Language). But no one’s made any comments, and the three of us are getting tired of talking to each other, so I thought I’d make a post specifically asking people for comments.

The site has come together pretty well, I think, but it still has plenty of evolving to do. What features and what sorts of posts would you like to see on the site? Does everything look okay on your combination of browser, platform, and settings? Do you think we need a header graphic, and are you volunteering to make one? Have you been coming to the weekly meetings, or is something keeping you away (like the fact that you live in Centreville or France), or have you only just now stumbled upon DCDL?

If you don’t feel like answering those questions, just leave a comment to say hi. And if you need to send me e-mail, use the address you’d expect (my name at the domain).