Viking Pundit tops 1,000,000 visits

Yes, it took a little more than four years but sometime early this morning the all-seeing Sitemeter tipped into seven digits. What can I say except: thank you to everybody for stopping by. Writing on this blog has been a great outlet for me and I’m thrilled to be part of the blogging community.

A couple of acknowledgments:

Moe Freedman of the now-defunct Occam’s Toothbrush first reserved a Blogger site for me under the title of my old website “Smarter Harper’s Index.” Since the format for that old site was a little different from blogging, I changed it to “Viking Pundit” in part due to my Swedish heritage and in part for my New Jersey high school: the North Arlington Vikings.

I have to give a major shout-out to Scott Elliott who saved my blog from oblivion during the great Blogger meltdown that claimed a handful of sites including Betsy’s Page. Thanks, Scott!

And why not thank the Blogfather, Glenn Reynolds, who first linked to Smarter Harper’s and has thrown me a couple of links over the years. By FAR, the most traffic I’ve ever received for a post was a link to a story in the Boston Globe about a pizza shop owner in Boston who packed up shop before the Democratic National Convention. The links I got from Instapundit, Hit & Run, and Fark probably accounted for over 100,000 hits alone.

During the 2004 election season, I contributed to Blogs for Bush. Matt Margolis is a stand-up guy and I had the fortune to meet with him for lunch this past fall while at a conference in Boston. Good luck with the book, Matt.

I’ve followed Lorie Byrd from Polipundit to Wizbang and I’ll follow her wherever she goes next.

Mark Coffey and I joined forces in the Coalition of the Chillin’ which unclogged the judicial logjam before President Bush added two justices to the Supreme Court.

Mark Kilmer has also been a friend to Viking Pundit; he’s now working a shift at Red State.

Will Franklin has been a kindred spirit on the topic of entitlement reform. Now that Scrivener has packed up, it feels like we’re the only Social Security bloggers left. We shall be vindicated!

I’d like to thank the handful of contributors who have thrown some money in the tip jar. Considering all the time I’ve spent here, it comes out to far below minimum wage. As in you need a bathysphere to see that far down. ;-)

And a final hat tip to all my fellow bloggers, especially all my favorites on the column to the left. Share the love.

What’s in the future for Viking Pundit? Well, now that I’m heading back to school, I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for blogging. But I’m going to keep at it because it’s been a rewarding experience and if the next million hits take a decade, then so be it.

So thank you, thank you, thank you, dear reader. Now where do I pick up my green jacket? What? No jacket? OK, well, I’m taking the weekend off. See you soon.

-Eric Lindholm