So, today at 4:47 p.m. Pacific time, Edie posted the 1,000th blog on GamerAndy.com
Wow.

One thousand posts -- that's a hellova milestone. When I started this site in July 2005, I can tell you in all honesty that I did not picture myself writing this more than 15 months later. Who the hell are we that you've read us for so long? It has always been my opinion that our personalities are what make the difference to you, the reader. Every single one of our writers emerged from our readership base, and I took them on gladly because I really like you guys. Our readers are the only reason I've continued to run what has frankly been a drain on my time and my wallet. Yes, I get some contacts out of it, but compared to the time put in? This shit is for love.

As such, I just really wanted to thank all the listeners who tuned into the show last night -- where we revealed our new plans for GA -- for being so damned supportive. Freakin' tear to the eye, I shit you not. It was a hard decision to try to make a business out of this, but it's something I feel very strongly about. I think that we can do this, and that we can do it without sacrificing what it is that makes GamerAndy feel like home to some of us.

Today (still technically the 17th), we rolled out a new format for GamerAndy.com: Lets Be Freaking Huge.

Whereas before we would post once or twice a day, expect to see no day go by when less than 20 or 30 articles are posted. It's gonna take a while for us to get into the swing of things, but the goal is 40 posts a day. My goal here is to make it so you, the reader, gets used to the idea that when you're looking for your fix of gaming news, we're the first place you think to go.

I want some of you to just sit on the front page refreshing because we have new stories going up every half hour. It's good for you and it's good for us.

So that's what I'm asking of you -- since there will be more to read on GamerAndy.com -- to read more of GamerAndy.com. In exchange for this, we'll be able to take those numbers to larger studios and publishers and get access to content and connections previously unavailable to us, and we'll take THOSE stories and bring them right back to YOU.

Additionally, we have some really cool community features coming in a future site revamp. I'm gonna be getting in touch with some of our most hardcore forum members about a little project. No, it's not the Community Roundtable (but that will be back, as well, come December). You guys made this happen for us, so now that I'm taking this all seriously, I have every intention of making it worth your while.

We've already started to see repercussions for our actions: Today was our best day EVER, traffic-wise. Expect many more.

Here are our stats from last month. At the end of this month I'm going to give you those unedited numbers as well and we'll see how they pan out.

Month: Oct 2006

Unique Visitors          55162

Visits 93228

Page Views    236632

Hits 3298019

Bandwidth  84.86 GB

This is our starting point.

Let's see how high we can make this bird fly.