Journal: News & Comment

Happy 9th birthday(-ish) to this website

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This month marks 9 years since I first created this website on an old Mac using the SimpleText editor and an ancient version of Photoshop. Some things still persist from those bygone days, including the odd 100x88 pixel size of my little portrait in the corner, the wording of my intro text, and a couple of my essays.

Last month I hit what I think is a new record for the number of different countries from which I've had visitors to this website: according to my web server, we're up to 127 different ones (discounting the #3 result, "unknown").

The top results, unsurprisingly, are the U.S.A. and Canada, but I was surprised to see, for instance, Latvia beating out South Korea, Finland, and New Zealand—or Vietnam ahead of Norway and Israel. I even had visitors from Kyrgyzstan (as many as Bermuda—three—and more than the one from Belarus!), Nepal, Myanmar, Madagascar, and Cambodia.

This is a moderate to low traffic site in the scheme of things. Something like 1200 people come here every day, almost all of them arriving from some Google search or outside link. Still, I have anywhere between 60 and 100 people around the world who visit the site regularly, and I've heard anecdotally that a number of them have it as their home page, which I still find astounding. Quite a number also read my RSS feed, but I don't know how many individuals that represents.

Still, in 2005, the site had close to 350,000 visitors, viewing over a million web pages, and whose computers slurped up almost 150 GB of data from my site (that last amount will be much larger this year—since I started podcasting my original free podsafe music, my monthly bandwidth usage has gone up to nearly 30 GB so far).

Other than the home page, that podcast is the most popular page on the site, followed by my articles on wirelessly networking old PowerBooks, buying a cheap guitar and getting a good tone out of it, digital pianos, my desk, Johnny Cash's most famous photo, buying my album, email etiquette, good drummers, aerial photos of Canada, and the Indian Ocean tsunami.

It's been awhile since I've estimated how many words I've written in this journal, my blog, which started in late 2000. If I've kept up my writing rate of roughly 4,800 blog words per month since 2004 (and I may have accelerated), it's now well over 300,000 words (totally aside from all the other stuff on this site), or 800 pages worth of print—a little over half the length of War and Peace.

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