This blog is 4 years old today.

And this is the 10,792nd post. I have posted every single day these past 4 years, averaging over 7 posts a day. It started like this, on January 14, 2004:

This blog is called Marginalia, because I'm writing from Madison, Wisconsin, and Marginalia is a fictionalized name for Madison that I thought up a long time ago when I seriously believed I would write a fictionalized account of my life in Madison, Wisconsin. There is nothing terribly marginal about Madison, really, but I do like writing in the margins of books, something I once caused a librarian to gasp by saying. Writing in a blog is both less and more permanent than writing in the margin of a book.

But the blog didn't stay named Marginalia. I changed the name to Althouse on day 2. Despite the name change, I really did see myself as writing marginalia that maybe somebody would run across one day on some dusty back page of the internet.

I remember when I started blogging, my across the hall colleague Gordon Smith told me his blog had about 60 readers a day, and I wondered how one could accumulate 60 readers. How I would love to have 60 readers! He told me of another law blogger who had 400 readers, and that seemed amazing. How do you get even 1 person to show up in the first place and read, and then how would you get them to come back and read every day?

I didn't know, but I loved the writing and found it truly intrinsically rewarding from that first post. Just the idea that people — anywhere — could read it was thrilling. To be here, now, 4 years later, still writing — with readers — is an immense joy.

Thanks to everyone for stopping by.