Holidailies: Register, sponsor, read

If you’ve ever read Ain’t It Cool News (AICN), or anything about the Butt-Numb-A-Thon (aka BNAT), you know that AICN founder Harry Knowles refers to the annual BNAT screening event as “Geek Christmas.” It takes place on or around his birthday, and he obviously loves to plan the movies to show, the treats in the gift bags, the guest list, and the event as a whole. I haven’t actually attended a BNAT yet, but I can imagine he is just as enthusiastic during the event as he appears to be beforehand.
I don’t have a BNAT event to schedule (maybe someday …) but I suspect I know exactly how he feels. For the past seven years, my own little happy holiday takes place in mid-November and December. For the past two days, I feel like it’s Geek Christmas, or to be fair to my Jewish husband, at least Geek New Year’s … well, there’s definitely a holiday spirit in the air.
We opened Holidailies for registration on Friday morning. Since 12:01 am on Friday, I’ve received dozens of email alerts that people have signed up, and it’s like being showered with tiny gifts. People I know in real life, people whom I didn’t realize kept websites anymore, people who seem to update sporadically are all signing up and it’s a real treat. I have been known to exclaim aloud, or IM The Beau with joyous, “Look, Margaret signed up! And Pooks is signed up, and Katie! I forgot about Katie!” Later in the day, “Oh, my god, Jane Duvall has a site again!” and “Oh, look who’s back!” I nearly ran out of exclamation points. The Beau, who gets the same email notifications, even pointed out one or two signups he was happy to see.

As I’m writing this, we have more than 50 people signed up for the portal and for Holidailies at Home … including me. I signed up Celluloid Eyes last night. I’ve been participating for six years, since the very first year (2000) when Holidailies didn’t have a proper name and was just my spur-of-the-moment decision to update every day. I was joined by a half-dozen or so other journallers (as we called ourselves back in those ancient times). I think the only other person who’s participated every year is Kymm Zuckert, although there’s no real way to check other than asking Kymm herself. Anyway, even if you don’t care about Holidailies, what this means is that I’ll try to post something to this site every day in December.
If you’ve never signed up for Holidailies, maybe this is the year. I mentioned Pooks earlier … she actually started her blog last year in order to join Holidailies. It’s a very good way to jump-start your daily writing and establish good daily writing habits. At least for a month or two, anyway. You don’t have to write personal secrets — you can submit your film blog or book blog or music blog if you want. If the portal seems too intimidating, try Holidailies at Home.
I’d also like to mention Holidailies sponsorships. If you sponsor Holidailies for a day, your banner ad, with a link to your website, appears at the top of every page on the Holidailies site that day. It also appears once in the RSS feed. Holidailies attracts a huge amount of traffic in December from people who visit the site, sometimes multiple times a day, looking for interesting content. A sponsorship is a great way to draw new visitors to your website or project. It’s $15/day, which is extremely affordable. The money goes to cover the server costs for Holidailies.
Finally, if you have no interest whatsoever in writing daily or sponsoring Holidailies, I hope you’ll join us on Dec. 1 when the posting begins, and partake in a little reading. The portal provides you with links to new entries regularly — you’ll never run short on material to read. In the past, portal participants have come from all over the U.S. and a number of other countries, we’ve had moms and daughters both participating with their individual sites, and a variety of topics and interests are covered. It’s the most wonderful tiiiime … oh dear. Holidailies makes me a little too festive sometimes. Can you understand why?