The comprehensive state of the world - Part 3

While being 'out' for 6 weeks, plenty of stuff has happened on my blogs and its related projects. So without further ado, here is Part 3 of my 'catching up' exercise.

The most important stuff first: Change Starts Here, the social project we started on The Road almost 2 years ago, keeps on flying high. I just posted the details for our latest batch totalling $1,000 in loans.
Our Kiva team now counts 82 members, who issued a total of US$35,325 in 894 different microfinance loans. Ieehaa!
Check out the project scorecard and join our Kiva team!

Lemme see, what else happened?
Oh, we passed our 500,000th visitor on The Road! Iehaaa once more!

During the month of July, I had serious problems with the hosting of several of my blogs. Humanitarian News and BlogTips went offline for days in a row. I described my battle to get the sites back up in this post. I am now working on moving the hosting to a more reliable provider.

Still, that did not stop Humanitarian News from doing its job. In July, we collected 25,600 articles from 1,012 different sources and now store a total of 244,770 articles. On a downside, the poor performance of the servers forced me to shutdown the customized search and user-defined RSS feeds, though. Hopefully these can be revived after we moved Humanitarian News to its new host.

Meanwhile, my Twitter network kept on growing by itself. @aidnews now has close to 7,500 followers, @humanitynews approaches 3,000 followers. @newsongreen, @NonProfitBlogs have both well over 1,000 followers. @ChangeThruInfo and @AidBlogs are progressing more slowly, but steadily...

I get more and more requests from nonprofits to publish their press releases, which increased the traffic by 200% on my newest blogs The NonProfit Press. Shot from the Hip, a site close to my heart where I post sound, video and picture snippets straight from my mobile phone, has now well over 1,000 visits a month.

Several readers sent me lists of nonprofit blogs to add to my list, which totals almost 800 blogs at this moment. I made an analysis of the most common issues I found in these blogs in this post. The latest posts from each of these blogs are neatly aggregated (even though I say so myself) on The NonProfit Blogs and its dedicated section on Humanitarian News.

In the coming month, I will pick up quite a bit on BlogTips where I have a lot of pending posts, and expand the functionality in some of the other blogs e.g. putting in search boxes and finetuning the search engine optimization. So plenty of stuff to do.