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by Matt Armstrong

Now we are One

With the impending first anniversary of my blog on Tuesday, and this being my 200th post (yes, really), I thought it would be appropriate to pause for a moment of gentle reflection.

In February 2003 (the earliest month for which I still have statistics for the pastemagazine.org domain), we were getting a daily average of 28 visits* a month. This has risen steadily over the course of the year to a current daily average of 87 visits. In terms of pure hits*, we’ve gone from a monthly total of around 4 000 to nearly 15 000 last month. Sure, it’s not going anywhere close to the bandwidth limit, and a fair few of those hits and visits are just the Google bots relentlessly crawling over the pages on an almost daily basis, but it’s still a nice rise, and it would be fair to say that the blogs are largely responsible for that increase (given that the rest of the site is mostly unchanged from a year ago).

If you stumbled across the site and/or blogs and stayed, then hello to you. Perhaps you searched on in via “brain surgeon’s salary“, or “bmg copy control” (Psst: Just click Cancel or hold the SHIFT key when you insert the CD… It’s that easy! I probably should keep quiet about that, or I presume my lawsuit will be in the post now that the BPI plans to start suing downloading grannies et al.), or maybe one of the more unsavoury search queries I discover from time to time nestling in the log files along with your IP address (if you ever thought that the Internet is an anonymous medium, then you couldn’t be more wrong), although if that is the case, I suspect that you didn’t stay for long. Or maybe you’re an old college friend/lurking reader, ex-housemate, work colleague, or Australian. In any case, if you like (or dislike) what you read, do leave a comment. It’s nice to know there’s someone out there, at least.

* dull explanation of terms: “hits” means the total number of page requests sent to the server, so if you come to the site and click on 5 different pages, which include 3 images somewhere on them, that counts as 8 hits; “visit” collates together all the pages you click on within a 30 minute period, so those 5 pages and images count as 1 visit.

4 thoughts on “”

  2. Thanks. I can’t quite believe I have been doing this for (almost) a year. In entirely unrelated developments, this week’s b3ta newsletter has this interview with the guy who wrote Solitaire for Windows.

    I particularly like this question:

    “Have you ever been caught playing Solitaire in the office and passed it off as software testing?

    There was a “boss-key” which when pressed would display some random .C code. Microsoft made me remove that.”

    In the 21st century, of course, we don’t need Solitaire.
    We have blogs.

  3. That year went very quickly. It hardly seems fair that time rushes past when one is happy. Someone should have a word.

    Just a brief note: the site has changed a bit – at lest three or four new pieces in Prose. Still waiting for your novel to appear there though Matt.

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