Daily Kos, always miles ahead of the pack, has made the move from MT to Scoop. The move will be fully complete in the next day or two, but if, like us, you can't wait, you can go check it out now here. You can also register and get acquainted with the new features. It is really awesome. Kos, you've done us all proud.

Kos has leaped into the Instapundit and Atrios category in daily visitors. About 40,000 people a day read his blog. Kos was also kind enough to re-design TalkLeft for us back in June, 2002. We are thrilled that he has had such great success. And we bet this is only the beginning.

Atrios has beat our record. Last month we wrote Will Link for Laptop and a generous reader bought us our brand new Sony Vaio with no strings attached in 7 hours. (Atrios linked to our post right after it went up, which likely was a big help in getting the word out.)

Monday, Atrios put out a plea for his own new Sony laptop (same model we asked for.) Someone bought it for him in 3 hours....on top of that, appreciative readers maxed out his Amazon Honor account with $3,400 in donations.

We think it's great when readers show their appreciation for bloggers' efforts with donations. We know others disagree, and each to his or her own, but we're happy for Atrios. He deserves it.

We just got hit with 31 "preteen" spamming comments. We don't have the time to individually find the posts, delete the comments and then rebuild the entries. We spent a few hours doing that yesterday with "lolita" comments. So if you see a comment with "preteen" that says something about this being a nice site, don't read it. It's child pr0n.

Lots of other MT blogs are being hit, and we understand a solution may be out tomorrow. We'll install it when it's available, provided we can figure out the instructions.

Update: We have such a great hosting company. It's called Hosting Matters. They are totally on top of the problem and have just instituted a block on the range of IP addresses this spam is coming from. We've gone through several hosting companies, and really think this one is tops. The site works fast and they are always available to respond to problems. We found them through Instapundit, but we know that lots of other big weblogs use them as well. Calpundit is one that comes to mind. So if you're in the need of a new hosting company, we highly recommend them.

Apparently we're not the only one getting hit with comment spam from a robot named Lolita that leaves links to explicit material --particularly involving pre-teens. So is Teresa at Making Light. Thanks to Reading & Writing who did some digging and found out who's behind it.

Update: There's a cure. Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist will be released Monday.

A big thanks to Skippy and Tacitus for their support, even when they disagree with our positions. Disagreement is fine, personal attacks cheapen the commenter and feed the opposition.

Damn Foreigner has moved so please update your bookmarks. Mark Kleiman too.

Congrats to Atrios and Daily Kos who have had 1 million unique visitors for the month of September--records for both sites. We always begin our blog day by reading both of them--it's no surprise that the rest of the politically-oriented news world does too.

TalkLeft had its one millionth unique visitor early this morning. We began stat counting on June 22, 2002. There have been 1,611,409 page views in that time.

Unique visitors are not the same as hits. For example, for the month of September, 2003, we've had 89, 111 unique visitors who have made 204,720 visits and viewed 431,961 pages. Hits just for September, 2003 so far number 865, 506.

The blogs and internet news sites referring us the most visitors for the month of September are Atrios, Warblogs.cc, Instapundit, Daily Kos, Buzzflash and Cursor. Thanks, guys!

According to Blogstreet, today we are the 11th most influential blog and the 66th most popular blog.

Most importantly, thanks to all of you who have read and supported this site with words of encouragement, links and donations. Tommorrow is our (the author's) birthday so we feel like hitting one million today is an extra present.

One of our stat programs gave these meanings to the various terms:

It's Bill O'Reilly Day around the blogosphere with many bloggers writing as O'Reilly today. Atrios has outdone himself. Don't miss it.

Congratulations to Atrios. Eschaton recorded its 5 millionth visitor today.

Atrios asks you to express your congratulations by donating to the DNC.

We'll do the same. We're small potatoes by comparison, but TalkLeft will hit the 1 million visitor mark sometime tomorrow morning (And 1,700,000 page views. Since June, 2002.) Boot Bush in 2004, give early and give often.

Our Altercation column is up. A big thanks to Eric for asking us to fill in for him today.

We'll be altercating over at MSNBC's Altercation Wednesday, filling in for the moving Eric Alterman. Don't forget to stop by. Charles Pierce fills in today--taking on John Ashcroft and his fervor for the death penalty, among other topics. Charles is a tough act to follow, but we'll give it our best. As he points out, altercating is a far better job than moving Eric's boxes.

Atrios is a prince. Our prince.