Every few months I like to update my regular readers on what goes on behind the scenes here at Homeland Stupidity. This fall there’s some good news, some bad news, and from a few of you I need some help.

First, the good news. I’ve spent much of the summer quietly promoting Homeland Stupidity all over the Internet, and the results are beginning to show. Readership has more than doubled from six months ago, we’ve added contributing writers, and have been listed in Google News for a couple of months now.

Indeed, the site has outgrown the shared hosting account typical of almost everyone else’s site, and a short while ago, I moved it to a dedicated server, which has more than enough power to handle ten times the current levels of traffic, perhaps more. I moved before it was strictly necessary, because some of the traffic is coming in bursts, which many shared hosting providers can’t handle. This is also known as the Slashdot effect, where an extremely popular site links to you, and the influx of traffic cripples the web server. I’ve made technical improvements on the server software to handle being on the front page of two such popular sites at the same time, and indeed, a few weeks ago, exactly that happened.

There’s more good news, though, and you’ll have to keep reading to find out what it is.

The bad news is this costs money. While I save a significant amount of money by being skilled in system administration and handling that myself, the cost of a dedicated server is still fairly significant. I had planned for this, and for the foreseeable future, the costs are covered entirely by revenues from ads displayed on the site. Unfortunately, while the money is there for next month, and the following month, and going forward, the revenues fell just a bit short for this month.

That’s where you, my regular readers, come in. Many of you read this site via RSS, where I’ve been pleased to provide the full content of the site’s posts without ads. Unfortunately, you’ve also probably noticed that the frequency of posting has dropped this month, sometimes to once per day or less, and the timeliness of posting has dropped as well. Because revenues were short, I had to go find other things to do to cover the costs of running this site and keeping food in the refrigerator; this site is my full-time job.

This time next week, there won’t be a financial issue here, as the monthly revenue checks will be in. And the stats for the following month’s checks look more than sufficient to cover costs. However, we’ve run completely out of money, and there are still bills to pay between now and when the checks arrive.

Long time readers will know that I rarely ask for direct contributions to the site. The last time, in fact, was about nine months ago, and while there’s a page for doing so, nobody has in fact contributed directly for the last nine months. But the need is immediate and urgent. Some things just won’t wait for the ad money to arrive next week, and so I’m asking for a very few of you to contribute a very small amount of $5.00 or more to keep Homeland Stupidity alive for the next seven days.

Without direct, immediate contributions, it’s unlikely that I will be able to post anything for the next week, as I’ll be too busy offline scrambling to find the money necessary to ensure the bills are paid and Homeland Stupidity remains online. This, indeed, is what I spent much of the last month doing, rather than writing here. Your contribution will help ensure that I can remain on task and bring you the content you’ve come to expect, and hopefully this will be the last time that I have to make such a call for help from my readers.

Finally, I promised more good news. The more good news is I managed to convince an actual print newspaper to issue me press credentials. While this means I may occasionally have to write something for them, I’ve already been published in a special edition of the newspaper (not available online), and the press badge will pry open a few more doors and help me improve the quality of reporting here, as well.

I’m looking forward to the future of Homeland Stupidity. In almost two years it’s been a wild ride that’s taken me from a personal space for ranting all the way to a respected online destination for news, analysis and libertarian opinion. I hope you’ll contribute to ensuring that we can all take this ride together, and even if you can’t, I hope you’ll stay with us and see where this leads in the next two years.