Our "Site of the Week" column is ending a 200-week run in the local newspaper, but never fear. A pithier version will continue online ad infinitum. Still, the conclusion of this four-year series in print has given us pause to reflect on the paridigm shift. 

"I’ll be right there," my wife called from her little office at the top of the stairs. "Just let me check my email."

Then she screamed. I knew the drill.

"I have 170 emails!" she groaned. That’s a few dozen more than her usual, but this is the busy season for the nonprofit agency where she works.

"Don’t worry," I called back. "I’ll go work on mine too. Catch you later."

The Fates were kind. I only had 125 emails on the computer in my office at the other side of our little backyard. Half were probably people entering the contest on my main web site. Half-of-that-half were likely security reports from my virus software, letting me know it’s on the job. The 30-or-so remaining would take half an hour to sweep through.

I don’t remember life before email. Heck, I don’t remember email before spam and I can barely recall spam without pictures. There are photographs of me, I’m told, without a computer, so there must have been such a time, but it’s gone now.

Among today’s email was an offer from a company in Hungary requesting rights to republish some of my photographs from the web site. The guy in Hungary had seen the pictures in a German magazine and looked me up online. He was willing to pay $180 for four digital photos of tombstones I shot while vacationing in Vermont. The Germans paid $400. I’m not much of a photographer, but I have sold those exact pictures four times so far. According to my webmaster Norm, over 2,000 people visit my web site every day while searching for pictures on Google Images. Thousands more come through Google itself, more from Yahoo and now more from that Microsoft search engine. With almost 8,000 web pages online, I get plenty of traffic, and traffic leads to email.

Another electronic note was from a Russian filmmaker. He was reading my John Paul Jones stuff online and asked if I could call him in New York City. I did. We talked for an hour about a possible movie project. I told him that I had already worked on a film script about John Paul Jones for Universal Studios in Hollywood. That was a couple of years ago. The project got shelved, I was told, when Russell Crow signed with another company to do the tall ship film "Master and Commander", but I was bound by my contract not to recycle the script ideas.

All that sounded pretty cool when I said it aloud to the Russian filmmaker. The Hollywood people had called after seeing the web site too. I never met any movie stars. I never even got out of my office, but I did get paid to write about a topic I enjoy. And the fascinating part is that I didn’t go looking for the work – they found me.

In the eight years that I have been online writing about the Seacoast region, lots and lots of people have found me. It is the nature of the Internet. If you carve yourself a unique topical niche, and if you keep the same address, and if you keep adding original content – they will come. Any obsessed person with an Internet connection and a web site can do that. The trick, of course, is whether you can get them, or someone, to pay.

That, I am proud to announce, has finally begun to happen here. I knew it would. More and more Internet connections are turning into income-generating opportunities. More and more advertisers, too are discovering that people really do buy stuff online and that web banners and links really work. I could offer you case after case in which companies have literally been saved from bankruptcy by the Internet and the truly miraculous ways in which it connects people.

And it’s about time too. I’ve been building my web site from 20-40 hours a week since 1996. I was already online when the Google-boys came up with their search engine idea. As a result of all the traffic and thousands of loyal readers, my Google "page rank" is pretty high. Heck, just type the word "seacoast" into Google and check. Right now, out of 554,000 entries, my web sites show up as listings #2, #3 and #6. There are people who would kill to get into the Top Ten just once. I did it the old fashioned way with pure hard-headed Yankee sweat. What my grandfather did with a tractor in his field, I did with my trusty little keyboard.

My goal has never been to make a million bucks. My dream is simply to write, pay my mortgage, buy groceries, and keep writing. I like what I do, but the odds – until the Internet came along – were stacked against me. The average freelance writer, someone who truly writes for a living, makes about $7,000 a year. Based on those stats, I am now an "above-average" writer.

But the Web is a harsh paymaster, constantly re-inventing itself. Web sites have to be updated, databased and redesigned. My site has looked pretty much the same since it opened, just a lot deeper. That all changes soon. Webmasters Norm and Louise have been working with me for three months to launch a zippier, easier-to-navigate version. They have built a new databased "shell" around the huge existing site. Once that is functional, we will slowly adapt thousands of archived pages into the new format. We’re adding new sections, building alliances with other "content providers" and expanding. Soon enough, using the RSS process, you will be able to read the site on your cell phone, maybe beam it into your sunglasses soon, or listen to it on a talking swizzle stick.

I was beginning to think the site had become too big to revise. Even a few weeks ago it seemed like running a whale through a keyhole, but Norm has lots of tricks. We’ll be moving, for example, to an open-source code called Mambo that offers enormous flexibility at very low cost. We’ve cut down the hosting fees, sped up the download time, increased our server space.

It’s all very exciting, and time consuming, which is why this column – in the local newspaper at least -- has reached its finale. Writing 200 web site reviews here has taught me a lot, and the time has come to apply those lessons to my own work online.

In fact, the wife and I are heading out to celebrate the conclusion of the newspaper version of this column and the rebirth of my web site. Well, we were. That was two hours ago. Maybe I should send her an email to see how she’s doing.