We have now reached the millionth article submission to our network.  Its some achievement and a great thanks to all our loyal authors and the dedication of our editorial team.

Its taken us 4 years of work, but we are there.

Just realised that my twitter account has been compromised - seems like the last 30 posts have been inserted as advertising has flooded in - it could be that one of the third party applications I use is the source, just to be sure I have changed the password and deleted the trash.

It would happen just when I was busy on some other projects and not watching my twitter account, anyways at least its sorted now.

We are trying an experiment for a couple of weeks, we have extended the amount of description at the beginning of each topic section, for example automotive articles now has a block of new text at the top.

For a while I have been thinking that our topic pages lack much static content, they are full of useful articles, but these change every 24 hours, so hence the experiment, if our rankings for phrases such as submit automotive artcles, or find free auto articles etc, then it will have been a success.

We may retain this in our new design due to be live shortly, or discard, will keep you all posted.

Our legal video section is proving as popular as our legal article one. I spent a good few hours watching legal videos today - the quality is really high, which is great news for our visitors.

Here are a few I liked:-

You Deserve a tax holiday You deserve a TAX HOLIDAY and an end to assessment of federal income taxes. The immediate effect of this Tax Holiday will be to leave more money in your pocket. You’ll take more money home with every paycheck.

Who screens the screeners Its a good question.

Texas Workers Compensation Lawyers Texas Worker’s Compensation entitles you to workers comp medical and income benefits if you have been injured on your job.

Lemon Law All about the law surrounding lemons, not the fruit variety!

An Introduction to the Patent System This one is really interesting showing jurors about patent law.

Its surprising just how many law firms are using youtube to promote their firms, but with sites like Article Alley using more and more of this type of content you can see why.

Yesterday saw article 950,000 go live on Article Alley, we don’t list all the articles that get submitted, and currently only about 55% get approved. But nevertheless thats a lot of articles and a lot of work by our authors.

We expect that the 1,000,000th Article will be live this month.  We are still thinking of something special to mark that event.  More about that soon.

I blogged about the seo contest that is currently running for the phrase Sulumits Retsambew articlealley is currently #51 on google.com which is pretty good going considering the only work done consists of a single post in our blog and now this follow up one.

our site performs well for thousands of phrases, and authors are always welcome to sign up and submit their own articles for free - you can quickly get 1,000’s of visitors and with them a lot of great exposure for your site.

Enjoy the contest!

As part of our new site roll out we will be tightening up on the quality of articles that we show live on our site,  duplicates have crept in and whilst these are not huge in number we are taking action to cleanse these from our database.

Also we will be looking more closely for broken links in existing articles, so if you have any old ones that point to old pages or expired domains, then now is the time to login and edit them.

Our site guidelines can be found here.

We plan to push Article Alley up a notch to take us back to being a top tier directory.  Keep popping back as our new site will be live very soon.

We have now added nearly 300,000 videos to Article Alley since January!  Its taken a long time to review all of these, and some more review work is still going on.

Food and drink has long been a popular article section, and is also providing popular for videos.

Here are a few videos I have enjoyed watching:-

Pairing wine with food Today wine and food people know that two principles can help in matching wine with food: the complimentary principle and the contrast principle.

Shrimp Cocktail and wine Heather Johnston demonstrates how to make shrimp cocktail, based on a recipe by Jacques Pepin and Julia Child.

How to make homemade wine Use natural corks for organic wine making at home; learn to cork homemade fruit wines in this free wine making video.

Wine Trails of France Region Loire/Cognac Drawing on vignerons and winemakers in appellations throughout France we present an intimate look at current wine styles.

Types of wine glasses Tips for selecting the proper wine glass for different types of wine.

Wine Library Dolcetto wines from the Piedmont Region of Italy offer straight up tradition to intense “Big Boy” wines.

Wine Types & Selection Red wine headaches can be avoided by paying attention to the amount…

As you might guess I enjoy a glass or two of wine!

A lot of articles are getting rejecting at the moment due to issues with authors articles.  We are rejecting articles due to spelling errors, broken links and articles being too short.

Our editorial process involves a check of all links and a check of the document, but we don’t correct errors found, just approve or reject.

If you can then please check carefully that your links all work.

Alexa the popular search engine and web statistics site continues to show us making good progress throughout June 2009. Alexa is great to compare your website to others, its absolute traffic levels are

not that accurate, because without access to your website logs its not possible to know.

What Alexa does is use the experience of several million users of its toolbar, that way it can track the pattern of these users and extrapolate that out to the complete internet, the flaw with this approach is that it magnifies the user who use Alexa, which are more SEO folk etc.

All the same its pleasing to see our traffic steadily rising. You have to be careful not to get addicted to sites like these! Otherwise you can spend all your time looking for evidence of the progress of your online marketing strategy, rather than actually getting on with it!

As long as you check Alexa just from time to time its fine, or use it to check out your competition, remember its easy to fake high Alexa traffic levels, but why would you manipulate the appearance of low traffic levels?

A lot of web users slate Alexa, but I think its fine and also a bit of fun at the same time.