DarkeJournal.com has grown into a regular part of thousands of Darke Countian's lives. In the next week or so, we will register our 5 millionth page view.
That's a lot of visits, particularly for a site that isn't designed to require 5-10 page views to read a single day's content.
We also recently crossed the 3,000 "like" threshold on our Facebook page, bolstered by posts related to the recent Whirlpool expansion announcement and a few fun photos of state officials (including Governor John Kasich) having lunch at The Maid-Rite.
In all that time and all those stories, the single post with the most page views is this editorial on the media's coverage of mass shootings submitted by the late Barbara Martin. Barb was always an avid supporter of DJ and a frequent contributor of opinion pieces, making her maybe the best example of how the site can be used by community members to engage others in important conversations to generate discussion and provoking an exchange of ideas. This piece in particular had legs, as it was linked to from all over the web and currently has recorded 54,000+ page views all by itself. Other posts that seemingly took on a life of their own were this announcement of a meeting to discuss fracking, and this post that hosts a video of the Greenville Board of Education Candidate's forum from last fall.
Of course, DJ has evolved quite a bit since it began and has grown to be a center of online information for Darke County and the surrounding area, all done with minimal resources as a part time job/hobby with a staff of one. It is my goal that in the near future we will expand to include more features to accompany the high volume of community announcements and reports we currently host.
If you would like to contribute in any way (photos, written works, videos, or anything else I'm not thinking of), shoot me an email and follow the submission guidelines found here.
Your continued readership, support of our social media pages, and of course, doing business with any of our sponsors and letting them know you heard about them on DarkeJournal.com are all ways you make this site the continued success that it is.
Thank you to everyone who has made DJ part of your lives throughout the last few years. I can't wait to see what we will be able to achieve in the next 5.
- John L
