And boy you have responded! When we started recording stats in May of 2007 (we have one of the best Web stat tracking software packages in the industry), we had about 84,000 page views for the month and 18,000 unique monthly visitors.

A unique monthly visitor is someone who was recorded once for the entire month. This person could have come back a hundred times a day, every day for the entire month, but this particular stat only counts them once a month.

In January of 2008, we had our best month ever with almost 29,000 unique monthly visitors and almost 535,000 page views! Both unique users and pages views have grown every month. I hope this means we are doing something right and creating something that you all enjoy and want to make part of your everyday life. (February of course isn’t finished yet but it is shaping up to be an even bigger month than January!)

First let’s talk just a bit about the new name, myjournalcourier.com.

Thousands of you knew us as journal-courier.net for years. And this name served us well … and it is still there for you die-hard fans with old bookmarks in your browsers. We switched names and brands for a couple of reasons. Myjournalcourier.com was easier to type and remember. Domains with .net are fine but what does everyone really remember, .com.

We chose myjournalcourier.com because we wanted you, Web site user, to feel a connection to the site, that it is indeed your site, because that is what we really believe. This is your site. We want everyone to feel like they have some ownership, that it is a part of their lives that helps enrich it every day, many times a day. We have built this for you, our community.

Well, I guess I am now one of the many that have entered the world of blogging! I don’t write much — usually only when something really gets me fired up — but I have made a commitment to try and be as faithful as I can be and post often.

I don’t know if this will attract a following or not … we’ll see. I guess if you don’t mind reading and want to hear what the publisher of a newspaper thinks about, you might find it interesting.

One of the goals with my blog is to keep you, our faithful readers, up to date from time to time on what we are doing here at the paper and on the Web sites. I hope you are all enjoying the new, expanded Web offerings we have been shoving out to everyone at what we feel like is breakneck speed over almost a year now.

We have really been working hard to bring a site to Jacksonville that is what I would consider to be a daily community meeting place, kind of like a cyber watercooler if you will, where you can catch up throughout the day on what is going on around town, get the news, sports and weather when you want it and also allow all of you to interact with us and others around our region.

Over the next few days, I’ll try to post a new thing each day or so about our site that hopefully will help you find more things to do on myjournalcourier.com and myjournalcouriervarsity.com!