Guess who turns one today?

A few weeks ago we forgot to renew our domain name and the site crashed for eight hours. Ha ha ha (?)! That was the day the OilersNation.com domain name turned one.

Today marks the one year anniversary of the actual site going live. Can it really be? Feels like a damned eternity—we can tell you that. Yep, one year ago today we sat at OilersNation HQ with Spyn and stressed about our little blog going live despite the fact we had not a single writer.

Our original plan (and yes we had a plan) was to build the Oilers News Aggregator for MSM news and a Blog Aggregator for all the Oilers blogs. Then you could come to one central place to read all your Oilers news and be routed to all the news sources. Sadly, despite our polite and begging emails, not a single blogger took us up on our offer. So we had no blogging content and thus yours truly was thrust into the role—despite the obvious handicaps of no experience writing, barely being literate and having a game knee we picked up in WWII.

Well one year, nearly a million views and over a million bad jokes later here we are. The plan has been shattered by all of you, the readers of the Nation.

We would like to thank Robin Brownlee and Jason Gregor for getting involved with our circus, being good sports and forward-thinking journalists. We would like to thank Jonathan Willis, Amber McCormick and jeanshortsandbaggedmilk for all the hours they spend getting their articles to us so regularly. We would also like to thank sites who link to us regularly. This includes David Staples especially, whose kind words early on gave our traffic a huge shot in the arm.

We would once again like to tell the four failed development companies we worked with to fuck off and thank them for nearly nothing. We would however like to thank our new developer for his work so far. We met with him this week and he told us “I could probably launch before the Dec 5 deadline if you wanted.” We peed a little in our pants when we heard this news and Spyn (touchingly) started to cry.

We would really really like to extend a big thank-you to Ignition Media. These guys are hands down the best designers out there. Plus they smell fantastic. And let’s be honest, that’s a nice touch.

We would like to thank our advertisers for agreeing to get involved with a new medium of advertising and working with us over the past year. Think Robin Brownlee comes cheap? Oh hells no! Jason Gregor told us once that he doesn’t get out of bed for less than 10 grand. These fine advertisers pay us so we can pay our writers. On time. Everytime. A big thanks goes out to Hudsons Canadian Tap House, Oodle Noodle Box, Rogers Wireless, Digital Communications, OmegaCell Communications, and dub5 Networks. And to the companies we are currently talking to: send money. Seriously. We need it.

Finally and most importantly we would like to thank you, readers of the Nation. Without your patronage we would have been forced to take the easy road months ago and turn this site into a hardcore German Pornography website. We are consistently floored by how many of you come here every day and the contributions you make. If we could marry each and everyone of you we would do it in a New York minute. But polygamy is illegal in these parts so no dice—we are far too pretty for prison.

We look forward to finally bringing out all of our cool plans in the next few weeks—bringing the new hotness to all you party people. We think you’ll like where we’re headed.

And lastly we thank you all for tolerating all of Jonathan Willis’ rascist rants.

We don’t know what his deal is, we really don’t.

Love,

Third Viceroy Lord Wanye von Gretzelstein IV