Four years ago today (well, yesterday, technically), this tiny little website published its first post. In the 1,461 days since then, we have published 2,681 stories, admitted 3,497 commenters, and read along through 3,001 Fanposts and Fanshots. We've added RossWB, HFMR, SMA, Storminspank (at least temporarily) and HEC to the roster. We've lost Jebus, and -- as we all saw yesterday -- found Jebus again. We've recorded 62 podcasts, prank called Jamie Pollard nine times, and written exactly zero words about an Iowa basketball team in the NCAA Tournament. Sometime tomorrow, we will have our 10,000,000th page view.
BHGP was born in the comment threads of pre-SBN EDSBS, where Jebus and Jacobi (#RIPoopspow) had the idea to start an Iowa blog. I was toiling away in relative obscurity at my own blog, cognizant of Jacobi's efforts at the brilliantly-named Steve Alford's Hair Gel, when AJ emailed me to see if I would like to join them at the newly-formed The Hawkeye Compulsion. City Boyz, Inc. put us on the map; in fact, there can be little doubt that nobody benefited from the stupidity of Dominique Douglass and Anthony Bowman more than we did. We were contacted about moving to SB Nation soon after. At the time, they had a prohibition against using mascots in blog names, and so we used our then-THC tagline, Black Heart Gold Pants. We quickly agreed it was a horrible decision and quite possibly the dumbest blog name ever. Four years later, here we are, with what we still believe to be the dumbest blog name ever.
We're proud of what BHGP has become (and what its most consistent author has become, as well), and we're honored by all the numbers we previously listed. But we're most proud of, and astonished by, the community that lives here. Everyone here started writing about Iowa athletics not for money, but for interaction. We've always written for our readers and our commenters. The first comment I ever received on my former site was from an angry Iowa State fan on a post I wrote about how, in the Chippendales SNL skit of life, Iowa was Patrick Swayze and ISU was Chris Farley, and it was exhilarating to know someone stumbled into a post and went through the effort to berate me. We now routinely rack up hundreds of comments from you, comments that are so frequent and so funny and sometimes so bizarre that we occasionally have to put them somewhere else for safekeeping. We occasionally get frustrated or angry with what we hear, but at the end of the day the basic premise remains the same: We write this for you, the Black Heart Gold Proletariat, and we are continually and honestly grateful to you for taking time out of your day to read the things we write. As we wrap up year four, your presence is our present, and thanks again for that.
Enough of the sappy crap. Back to Hate Week.