Time for a change. Some new colors, things moved around, a general freshening -- and a rail for advertising on the right side.

I've been getting overtures about accepting ads and decided that it would be the best way to move toward L.A. Observed paying for itself and, with luck, doing better than that. In researching how ads would fit in, I was thrilled to discover that the site has been visited almost 400,000 times since launching last May and has delivered more than 665,000 pages (and responded to 1.3 million hits).

Traffic increases each month, and February so far looks incredible -- an average of 10,000 hits a day (and a peak of 17,000+) even including the usual weekend drop-off. Not big numbers for a national political or news site, but I'm happy about it.

It's nice hearing from so many journalists, authors, bloggers and political types that L.A. Observed is the first web site they look at in the morning. They check back through the day for breaking news like our scoop yesterday on Doug Dowie's job change at Fleishman-Hillard. I take no pleasure at all in also being the first to report the death of Frank del Olmo, a good man.

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So thanks to everyone for reading. It's been refreshing, eye-opening and even fun so far. I'll finish the ad information page over the weekend, but if someone just has an immediate urge, Blogads can set it up online in about two minutes.

I'll be tinkering with the site's new design and redoing the "About" page, so critiques, ideas and rants are welcome. Private in email or public in the comments, whichever you prefer.

Also, I've finally given in to the blogger way and placed a Paypal contribution jar on the site. It's easy to do, and if you like what you see, supporting the site keeps it going smoothly. Think of it as a way to voluntarily subscribe to L.A. Observed. Like KCRW's fund drive, but without Ruth Seymour.