Bingham spends most of his time checking code and server status, responding to e-mails and researching ideas to improve the open source architecture of the Web site. "It's certain that someone will need help with something," he told Computerworld.

The lead-up to the 2008 presidential elections saw big improvements to the site's back-end code, which ironed out inefficiencies and reduced server load.

"The site didn't hold up very well at all in 2004; it crashed constantly, and I had to scramble around a lot trying anything I could to keep the site up," Bingham said. "Still, I was able to learn from that experience and ... was able to keep the site humming on [congressional election day in] 2006."

"By 2008, I was able to take the lessons learned, along with improvements made during 2007, and get the site tuned up to the point that it ran without a hitch on Election Day," he said.

The Daily Kos served up more than nine million pages on the day of the US general election, amazingly , although Bingham concedes there were a few errors with its election map.