Subscribe by Email (and Much Other Housekeeping)

I've added a block on the right to "subcribe by email."  If you enter your email address, you'll get a once-daily email, usually by 7 AM,  with all of the IP.com front-page posts from the previous 24 hours.  Having this will reduce the number of eyeballs that actually see the site every day, but will allow our readers another way to consume their IP.com content, and empowering our users is  most important to me.

If you're worried about privacy, the email addresses are collected by Feedburner, not by me personally.  That's one less thing for me to do, and that makes me happy.  And since I won't have the email list, you don't have to worry about me using it to send out a solicitation for United Way.

I've been meaning to do a major "state of the site" update for a few weeks, but keep putting it off.  In a nutshell, we've been publishing on Drupal for more than six months now, and the hiccups seems to be behind us.  We have (hopefully) gotten past most of the major hiccups, and I'm learning more every day.

Some of the mind-boggling stats from this very small corner of the blogosphere, which has grown way beyond anything I'd imagined when I started blogging in January 2005.

• Over 1.5 million total visitors
• 165 registered users, of whom 48 have written at least one blog post
• Over 3,200 blog entries total, including old posts imported from WordPress
• Over 52,000 comments, including old comments imported from WordPress
• We're serving somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 visitors per day
• 150 RSS subscribers
• We use around 100 GB of bandwidth per month
• Most of the statistics above are growing between five and ten percent per month

While this blog has my screen name on it, none of this would be possible without you and without the atmosphere of discussion which we've cultivated on here, together.  Thank you for your trust, advice and participation.

In the short term, I've got a few things I'm working on, and I hope you'll make some suggestions as well.

• Node moderation:  Allowing readers to vote on blog entries, promoting them onto the front page, or pushing them off of the front page, giving the community of users more control over the type of content they want to see featured most prominently.  (This feature was one of my primary reasons for jumping from WordPress to Drupal.)  I think it's ready for implementation now, and if I get time on Sunday, I'll roll it out for testing.
• Multiple themes:  I know that I've been hinting about this for a while, but I've gotten enough complaints to know that allowing you to choose how IP.com looks is very important to you.  First will be a dark-navy-background theme similar to the old IP.com look.  After that, I hope to have a half-dozen or so choices for users.
• Aliases repaired:  this past weekend's crash of the URL-alias table has led to some weirdness in blog entries that were posted from January to May of 2007.  I need to fix those links.
• Events:  stealing an idea from the Champaign County Democrats blog, I'd like to have a shared events calendar to which users can subscribe
• News aggregation:  I'd like to have a page that features the latest news headlines from a variety of local and Illinois news sources, so that users can browse them all in one place.
• Flickr:  I'd like to have a page that pulls photos from Flickr that are tagged as being of local interest
• YouTube:  same for local videos from YouTube

But that's enough about my plans!  What do you want?  How can we make this place more relevant and useful for you?