Two Hundred Large! (Accompanied by Actual Giveaway)

Yesterday was a Big Day in the history of Can I Get Rich On A Salary! A monumental event! An event dictating the use of many exclamation marks in successive sentences!

Yesterday, for the first time, the Feedburner count of the subscribers to this blog hit 200. 200 is a Very Big Deal. Among other reasons:

• It’s 1 more than 199.
• It’s twice as many as 100.
• It’s a mere 100 away from 300.
• It’s rapidly approaching 0.7% of the number of subscribers to some of the most-subscribed personal-finance blogs.

Interestingly enough, 200 may or may not be the number of actual subscribers to this blog. If you’re not familiar with how subscribers are counted by Feedburner, it’s through a complicated algorithm that is very secret—so very secret that I’m not allowed to tell you even a little bit about it.

In other words, I don’t have the slightest clue. They might as well be sitting in a back room with an abacus.

But I’m fairly sure this means the number of actual subscribers to Can I Get Rich On A Salary is squarely between 1 (my wife) and 6.6 billion (a rough estimate of the world’s current population), with some evidence suggesting the number is closer to the lower end of that range. And well, to tell you the truth, my wife’s not subscribed.

Incidentally, if you’re not familiar with what it means to subscribe to a blog, there’s a brief explanation of it in the tab, “Why Subscribe,” up above.

In any event, I’d like to thank all of the subscribers and readers of Can I Get Rich On A Salary, invite you to give me feedback on what you like and dislike and on what you might like to see here in the future, and have a thank-you contest to give away a $25 gift card. It’ll most likely be an Amazon gift card/voucher/certificate/whatever.

I’d like to use the contest especially to thank the most frequent and loyal readers, but (fortunately) there’s no real “Big Brother” way for me to know who you are. So let’s try it like this.

To be considered for the thank-you gift card, please send me an e-mail as follows.

1. Put “Contest” in the subject field.

2. Include information showing that you are a subscriber OR that you have been a commenter. For subscribers, look at the bottom of any recent post (in the e-mail or through your reader), and there is a message near the bottom that has a sentence that begins, “Subscribers are one of the real ______...” Put the word that goes in that blank in your e-mail. For commenters, mention the name under which you have been posting comments; and please point me toward any one comment that you’ve left on the blog (before today’s date) in which you mention being a frequent visitor or point me toward two different comments that you’ve left on the blog (before today’s date) (or certainly, just tell me you are already listed in the “Top Commenters” list). Spam and random non-personal-finance comments don’t count—and you can’t claim “Anonymous” comments!

3. Address to: blogmaster(at)canigetrichonasalary.com. (For those of you unfamiliar with this manner of writing an e-mail address, it’s done to prevent “scraping” of the site by robots and other automated programs that use e-mail addresses for spam and such. Replace the “(at)” with the “@” symbol!)

4. Send by the deadline of May 28, 2008.

5. Age 18 or older only please. (Seems like some sort of legal thing I should include, right?)

If you’ve been an ongoing reader but have not subscribed or been commenting. I’d sure love to include you. Perhaps you’d consider subscribing now? (If so, you can click on the link in the upper right of the screen or at the bottom of this post.) Pragmatically, I have no way of knowing when people subscribed or if they’re even really subscribers. So this is all honor system, karma, and so forth. Open to people subscribing right up to the deadline (but it’ll have to be enough before the deadline that you get a new post delivered by subscription before the deadline!).

I’ll assign a number to each “entering” reader/subscriber (one per person), in the order the e-mails are received, and then use a random number generator at some website to pick the winner.

Your e-mail address will be used to contact you if you are the winner or if there is some question about your entry. Of course, no selling or giving e-mail addresses to third parties. I’m going to try to deliver the prize by e-mail, which should work out—but if there is some hiccup, it’s possible I’d then ask for a mailing address. And I’d ask you for permission to use your name in the announcement of the winner—not necessarily anything personal or even real. First name and geographic location, or blogger name and blog, or something along either of these lines would be fine.

Thanks again, everyone. Most personal-finance bloggers are blogging to be read—not (believe me) for money or anything else. So please spread the word about this and any other blogs you frequent. The bloggers will much appreciate it!