As a tumultuous year draws to a close, both from an energy perspective and just in general, I wanted to thank the staff of this website, as well as TOD's readers and community who raise our level of discussion and potential impact by adding links, references, graphs and ideas, and by effecting local and individual change. I'd particularly like to thank our (sole) technician, Super G, and Drumbeat editor, Leanan, who have both tirelessly put in another year of volunteering their skills towards making the site run smoothly, and in the case of Leanan, continuing to find, organize and disseminate energy and resource depletion based news items every day of the year! (outside spring baseball training)

This post introduces what we are calling TOD:Campfire. Each Wednesday night going forward, we plan on highlighting a post/essay on what you, the TOD community, is doing about peak oil, and resource depletion in general. Topics will relate to wide boundary issues surrounding energy descent, including local food production, small scale energy production, experiments in living with less, or just general information and ideas to be shared with the online community.

The main fare on this site are empirical posts that highlight specific data surrounding energy depletion. The discussions that follow do not readily provide a forum for readers with special expertise in real skills or ideas not easily condensable into graphs or charts. We intend this once-weekly forum to be akin to a summer night sitting around a campfire, dreaming, hoping, and tossing around ideas that might bring about positive change. The types of discussions we would like to foster are where there are no right or wrong answers, just shared experiences, advice and wisdom. We have a wonderfully talented volunteer staff, but our expertise does not stray too far outside the analytical. Therefore we invite you, our readers, to submit guest posts that might be of educational interest to our online community. Next week we will kick this series off with a guest post from TOD commenter 'Wyoming'. Please use the thread below to suggest future post ideas or general comments. Email us at editors@theoildrum.com if you have an article you think would be appropriate to share.

Noon EDT on http://www.kzyx.org. Have a listen!

TOD:Europe also broke its monthly record--over 150k visits in the month! Talk about a "wow." Congrats guys, well done.

TOD averaged ~28k unique visits a day and ~61k views a day. Google analytics estimates that around 336,000 different visitors (by IP) came through here in the month of June. Wow...

The whole TOD enterprise doesn't happen without all of you coming here and taking part. We thank you for your patronage, your helping spread what happens here around the web, your civilly intelligent participation, and your enforcement of the norms we have created here. People can inform and learn from each other, and we thank you for making it happen.

More site stats under the fold, including our top referrers, which are sites you should patronize at every opportunity.

My colleagues here are pretty amazing people, aren't they? They work their rears off. :) Thank them the next time you get a chance--they deserve it, at least in my humble opinion!

You all are one hell of a community.