Tomorrow, our pals at Jalopnik will celebrate the site’s 10-year anniversary. At its start, founding-editor Mike Spinelli’s site was perched on the fringe of car culture, often poking fun. They weren’t exactly made to feel welcome by traditional media outlets and automakers, but they wore that as a badge of honor. Early Jalops Spinelli, Davey G. Johnson, Jonny Lieberman, Murilee Martin, Mike Bumbeck and people I’m probably forgetting about right now seemed to revel in their outsider status. They combed the Internet for bizarre automotive kinks and posted what they thought was weird and or interesting. Davey and Jonny posted long transcripts of heated DAF vs. FAF debates. Not only did people read them, they took sides.

Smart, funny commenters found a home at Jalopnik. It became the kind of community that every website aspires to have. I’m not ashamed to say that for a few years, I read every single thing those guys posted and commented more frequently than my former employers would probably have preferred.

The whole enterprise had this great, “Hey look at this cool thing I found! Let’s geek out on it forever!” feel that was totally earnest and fun. Because the guys themselves were so interesting, the car culture, or a big part of it, moved all the way out to the fringe just to hang out with them. The memes, tropes and inside jokes that tie today's car-folk together are more likely to have started at Jalopnik than pretty much anywhere else.

Today, the site is run by a different group of guys who are talented, interesting and totally enthusiastic about cars. They still publish first and make corrections later, which occasionally draws the ire of their colleagues. They still don’t do embargoes. But 10 years in, enthusiasts, automakers and even the established media outlets recognize the importance of what Jalops past and present have built for themselves and for the car community as a whole. When Jalopnik introduced Gawker’s new commenting system Kinja, Autoweek jumped at the chance to register an account and publish some of our stuff there for free. Also, The Jalopnik Film Festival is in its second year, and if you're able to be in NYC Nov. 6, you should go.

I don’t have quite as much time to read Jalopnik as I used to, but it’s pretty unusual for me to let more than a couple of days pass between visits. I even catch the old-school guys over there these days, pretending to scoff.

So, from 56-year-old Autoweek to 10-year-old Jalopnik, congratulations. We’re raising a glass to more decades of no good cotomer sevis and ordering a dozen of your world-class V8 motorcycle frames to celebrate.