Happy Birthday PVG! Now, here’s a… widget?!?

Websites are probably the hardest things to buy presents for. I mean, what do you get for something that has no arms or legs, is constantly busy with work, and sleeps in a server farm somewhere in Indiana? Well I agonized over this question for weeks, and finally came up with the perfect gift. You see, it turns out that websites — and blogs in particular — love having new functionality added to them. So, in celebration of Portable Video Gamer’s first birthday (which is like 10 in Internet years), I went out and got it not just one, but TWO swanky new widgets, accessible in the right-hand sidebar. The first new feature is a neat little map tool provided by whos.amung.us, which tracks where in the world our readers are coming from (everywhere, it turns out!). Yellow stars represent readers we have had in the past five days or thereabouts. Glowing yellow stars represent people who are currently viewing the site. The second widget is a shoutbox, which enables readers to communicate with each other and with us. Be sure to register your own unique username so that you can keep it the next time you visit. Give it a shot, who knows who you might meet!

In order to celebrate both our birthday and the inauguration of these two new features, we are going to be holding our first-ever PVG shoutcast in the chatbox, this friday at 7pm PST (10 pm on the east coast). Be sure to join us to chat about all of the goings on this past week in the handheld gaming world, as well as to check out the winners of our Drawn to Life contest. If all goes well, we plan to make this a regular weekly feature. We hope it will be a great opportunity to meet new people, catch up on gossip, and maybe even organize a few wi-fi matches.

Finally, on behalf of everybody at PVG (myself, Sergio, Chris and Brandon) I would like to thank all of our great readers who have joined us over the past year. After having started from scratch, now almost 1,000 of you check in with us on a daily basis to get your handheld gaming info. We are humbled by this awesome support and we look forward to another fun year of portable video games!