Lise and I had a lot of fun at a recent Connecticut River Valley Baseball League game. So much so that we decided to encourage everyone to go to a game this summer.

Specifically, it's our first iBrattleboro Day at the Ball Game and you are reading this you are invited.

Come support your favorite team, be they the Putney Fossils, the Chester Pirates, the Ludlow Gold, or our local team, the Brattleboro River Rats, in a double header at the Dummerston School Field on Sunday, July 25.

Our servers were hit with a hacker attack today. We're expecting it might happen again before it is fixed, so hang in there. We know about it and are working on it.

Lise and I were laughing that our weather page has the best scientific data for anyone who thinks we're living in the end times. To the official list of forecasts regarding volcanos, earthquakes, space events, and droughts, we are adding something new.

NOAA has created a web page to track the oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico. They are calling it the NOAA Deepwater Horizon Incident Response Page.

You'll find a link on the iBrattleboro Weather Page. Scroll down look between the volcano and drought reports.

In keeping with marking fun progress numbers, iBrattleboro passed 25 million page views in the last couple of days. This is, of course, something you should take credit for yourself. You make the site interesting. You write the news and commentary. There are many people who wish they had what we all have here.

Lise and I have been plotting and planning a new version of the site. We want to keep what works well, improve what works somewhat, replace what doesn't work at all, and come up with new ways to make the site useful and interesting for people who live, work and visit in Brattleboro.

Two recent stories submitted by nukewaste have been removed from the site at the request of the author. The stories are "Land Owner Tries to Keep the Public Out of Dummerston’s Only Town Park (Photos)" and "Commons Newspaper Spikes Dissent".

The author e-mailed "I own the copyright to those articles and photos. Please remove them from your web site now."

We're sorry for any inconvenience these submissions have caused to the community.

Quick housekeeping note: Some have been having problems today submitting comments and getting a rejection that says something about "spam detected" - it isn't your fault!

Overnight we were hit with a spam attack. There were about 150 story submissions for porn links sent by a spambot overseas. We did some configuring to reset the spam detector, and that caused some other problems as a result.

Things should be back to normal, and I apologize for any inconvenience. Send me an email if you are still having problems.

iBrattleboro.com turns seven this year, a reasonable amount time to have settled in and found its place in the community. But more than that, it's enough time for us to have gained some perspective on this thing called citizen journalism that we unwittingly unleashed here in Brattleboro.

What surprises me most is how little our perspective has changed. When Chris and I started iBrattleboro in 2003, this is what we said we wanted to do:

Seven years ago today, iBrattleboro was launched with a haiku about the enormous pile of snow outside our house. As I recall, the pile almost reached to the top of the porch at that time - today we have some slush out there.

As I type this today, we can all celebrate 23,895,943 page views, 14,386 stories, 4,959 calendar events, and 74,639 comments from 2,094 people who have registered to contribute to the site.

Join us in the upcoming Transition Putney four-event series exploring Local Foods, Local Farms. The series will give us, as a community, a chance to explore the question: “How we can strengthen the relationship between Putney food consumers and Putney farms?”

During the four-event series we will:

• Learn about how Food Coops across the country (including the Putney Food Coop) are reaching out to enhance local food production and consumption,

• Hear from local farmers about their experiences as they attempt to expand local markets