Happy Blogday Everyone!

Two years ago today, The Yorkshire Ranter was born in a striplit computer room in Royal Holloway College's International Building. Since then we've had ranting, spam, funnies, mystery jets, vituperation, stupidity, more ranting, and some terrible afternoons spent with HTML and frustration. I've picked over yards of extremely dull official documents, debated the EU with Chinese telecoms people (one of whom, I later learned, had previously tried to bribe my editor), been shouted at by a red porker with a CIA badge at the Hutton inquiry...and the most popular post in the lot was some twaddle about trams carrying freight in Vienna, which was picked on by BoingBoing.net and resulted in a surge of 2,578 hits over four days, including 1,000 on 22nd May 2005.

Mind you, some of the Viktor Bout posts attracted three-figure days, too, so I can't be too dismissive of the readership. People from all parts of the world read the Ranter, including Finland, the DR Congo, .arpa addresses, the Elysee Palace, the British Antartic Survey, and various parts of the US Department of Defence. Oh yes, and the North Derbyshire Chamber of Commerce, who visit daily. And some of you search for the most remarkable things. I'm not sure if my favourite is "thatcher unguents", which conjured up the image of some fool trying to replicate Maggie's "beauty" regime, or "2005 mail contacts of flying boat mechanics Ukraine", which came in from a cybercafe in Kinshasa. Whoever it was, I hope you got your flying boat fixed. If you're still stranded, I don't think I can help, but Carlos W might. He knows his flying boats, and according to his latest post carries the kind of stuff in his rucksack that would probably do the job. "Male bulging bellies", though, was just sick. But I'm proud to be the only Yahoo! result for colombian ghetto music, tunisian tribal music and italian national anthem.

I'm even more proud that Richard Chichakli and friends got their bank accounts frozen. Solid! I'd like to thank everyone who's helped so far by sending useful information, and even non-useful information. I'd also like to remind y'all that so far, no-one has ever used the PayPal donate link. Not even lye2.latimes.com, who researched his Viktor Bout story right here in considerable depth (read every last post, so he did), never got in touch with me, and finally published without any acknowledgement at all. Shame on you. I now have a job, but it's the principle of the thing.

But before you rush to send money, there's something more important I want from you: your comments. I'd like to hear what you want from this blog in the future.

Thanks for reading. Double thanks for commenting. Triple thanks for linking. And finally, this comment left at Tim Worstall's:

I've no idea why you persist with reporting this sort of twattish idiocy from the Yorkshire Ranter. There are plenty of good left-of-centre blogs out there - eg Harry's Place, Normblog - why not quote one of their articles instead of yet more wrong-headed nonsense from the Yorkshire Ranter.

Why indeed.