Breaking 20,000
Nine months ago this blog broke the 10,000 mark in unique visitors; this month, it broke 20,000. These numbers are not always precise–spammers have an effect, though not as large as they might, since the biggest-volume spammers usually don’t vary their IP addresses (I am still waiting for an MT-Blacklist-style referral spam deletion program; the only ones that exist so far are highly tecchie in nature). But still, the growth of the readership does jibe with expected growth in many respects. Here is a chart showing the progress over the last two years of blogging:
The first spike, in September 2003, came when I was linked to by MacSurfer, and got a highly unusual wave of visitors; the second spike, in September and October 2004, was due to election coverage, and readership waned in November. This month’s spike is largely due to coverage of the Terri Schiavo case. The general trend is an upward one, meaning that I could hit the ludicrous number of 30,000 before the end of this year. I say “ludicrous” because I already cannot accept that even a small percent of the numbers I’m seeing are coming by to visit. Mostly, I have Google to thank–8000 hits from them alone, accounting for 40% of visitors.
Greetings,
Well I must stand forth and be counted – I’m a regular reader ever since I originally googled for “twitching eye” and was directed to one of your articles – methinks you are now one of the premier repositories of information on ocular malfunction.
Ever since then, visit regularly and, in my opinion, an extremely good site with broad range of topics.
Keep doing-the-do.
Cheers
:: Blushing ::
Hi Luis,
I would recommend converting your templates to output php files simply to enable you to use referral karma from DrDave another Japan blogger. http://unknowngeni u s.com/blog/wordpress/ref-karma/ I installed it a couple of weeks ago, and then quickly installed it on all of my other sites as well. (You’ll need to make sure your hosting package supports PHP of course) I converted my MT install over to PHp in order to install it, and was so satisfied, that I have contibuted a bit of code to it, that will hopefully be in the next release which meets some of my special needs (related to mod_rewrite)
I’d be happy to answer any questions that you might have on installing it, but I think this is the most important piece of information you might need to know. It stops referral spammers dead. From my top 10 referral list in AWSTATS being almost entirely spammers, to not a single one on there.
Makes me happy
P.S. remove the spaces from the url above u s . c o m is in your mt-blacklist. That seems a bit harsh