Bike Summit fund drive update

Thanks to everyone who has donated so far to help pay my way to DC for the National Bike Summit. I’m looking forward to joining my friends at the BTA and spreading the word about how an independent advocate can use the web to build, nurture, and connect a bike community. Jessica at the BTA is already networking on my behalf, trying to set up meetings and introduce me to other advocates. It will be a great experience for me and one that will have a big impact on my ongoing work here on BikePortland.org.

In the last 8 days I have raised $281! Registration for the summit is $350 and there’s still airfare and hotel expenses which will probably be about another $350 bucks or so. If you visit this site a lot and like what you see (many people tell me it’s their home page!) now would be a great time to consider donating. I’ve got some handy PayPal buttons over in my sidebar or you can send a check (email me for the address).

For everyone that has donated so far, your support has allowed me to make this site even better. To give you a sense of how things are really taking off, here’s a comparison of my stats from December ’05 to this month:

December ’05
Pageviews – 33,951
Visits – 14,571

January ’06 (as of 1/27)
Pageviews – 66,472
Visits – 21, 533

That is some serious growth! Also, when I announced this fund drive 8 days ago, this site was ranked by Technorati at around 33,000th out of 25 million blogs worldwide. Today my ranking is 19,281. That’s not bad for a site that only covers the Portland bike scene.

Your supportive emails, compliments and donations are what keep me going. With your support I can to continue to realize my goals and work to build an even stronger bike community. Thanks for your support.

—now back to your regularly scheduled programming—