Yesterday I put up a short posting about wistful thinking, wondering what it would be like to have more than a handful of visitors to my site in a day (or week, or month).  Today I know what that feels like thanks to the generosity and kindness of one man.

This morning, as usual, I clicked refresh on the Mint tab to see what my total was for yesterday.  I nearly fell off my chair when the number was nearly a hundred visits higher than normal.  I did fall off my chair when I realized those visits had all happened between 10 pm and midnight.  And I was beside myself when I saw that today’s visits, hour by hour, are greater than I normally get in 24 hours.

Holy mackerel.

Thank you Mr. Blanc.  Your random act of kindness has pasted a smile on my face that won’t soon go away.  Domo arigato gozaimasu.

My visit numbers are amazingly consistent and, not too amazingly, small.  My site is about me and pretty much for me.  There are a few informational postings that have garnered visits, but the vast majority of the postings are about me as a person, or the events in my life.  Still, I average five or six hundred visits a month, and have for the two years I’ve been using Mint.

Since the beginning of this year, and the adoption of WordPress as my CMS, I have had a slight bump in these numbers.  While I can’t find a logical correlation between switching frameworks and increased visits, I am pleased that I am getting more daily visits, and higher numbers overall.

All of which brings me to my point today.  Every time I refresh my Mint page (always open in a tab of its own) I wonder the same thing briefly in the back of my mind, “Will this be the day that my site takes off?”  And for a few seconds while the page reloads I can imagine what it would be like to see several hundred visits for the day instead of a couple dozen.

That’s a lot of words.

Amazing what one guy, with no real purpose other than airing his emotional laundry, can do in six or seven years.

(Keep your 700 monkeys on 700 typewriters jokes to yourself.)

If you are counting sit-ups or stairs, a thousand is a big number. If you are talking about stars in the universe or people on Earth, a thousand is pretty small. When you consider that these thousand entries span a sixth of my life, encompassing four deaths, two births, three job losses, and their subsequent cross-country moves, then it is a large number indeed.

Here’s the first thousand, and to many, many more.

• ten years of knowing Michele
• 919,000 dollars earned
• eight vehicles owned (five cars and three motorcycles)
• seventy pounds of weight gained
• six employers
• five primary computers owned
• four cross country moves
• three cats owned
• two hundred-thirty-two thousand plus words written
• one marriage, from vows to death did us part

Who knows what the next decade of zanshin.net will see and record.

The new statistics are a truer measure of zanshin.net’s readers as only browsers are counted. The various software robots that crawl the web indexing what they find are still coming here, they just aren’t getting counted. Zanshin easily receives 200 “hits” a day when you factor in all the automated visitors. While my ego prefers the higher number, my sensibilities are happier with the truer figure.

Want to get a better idea of your site’s traffic? Have A Mint

It is hard for me to believe that I have written this much in just a few years time. In school I hated writing assignments; a thousand page paper due on some topic was cause for dread and procrastination. Now there are times when I can barely type fast enough to capture the thoughts in my head. Sharing myself through this site has been an amazing experience for me. I have exposed some of my biggest failings, greatest fears, highest joys, and happiest moments. Knowing that anyone who wanted to could read these words has added import and power to them.

Having this electronic diary, if you will, has also allowed me to look back at events and relive the feelings I was having in the moment. It is surprising how often my memories of the event are vastly different than what I wrote at the time. The job losses and moves have figured large in my writing, as has the emotional and spiritual growth I’ve experienced in the last few years. And it goes without saying that the recent death of Michele has caused me to write more and more.

I always shared my new postings with Michele. Often I would call here from work when I’d had some new thought and captured it here. I would read it to her or listen to her read it, and our connection would be that much stronger and that much deeper. I like to think that because of the focus these words have in my mind as I write them, that my thoughts can bridge the gap between this place of existence and the one where Michele’s essence is now. While I can’t know she is “hearing” these words, I still feel like I am sharing them with her. The sense of validation I got from including her in this process is still strong and still important to me.

200,000 words down, millions to go.

For the the three of you who venture all the way to the bottom of the home page, I have updated the counter there to show what I feel is the lifetime visits for zanshin.net. The traffic to my site has effectively doubled each of the past six years, and I have a fair idea of what my visit total was for the first four years. (Yes, zanshin.net will be ten years old in February 2006. Celebration details will be forthcoming.)

I’ve crossed the 100,000 visit mark, and should see something like 135,000 in time for the ten year anniversary. W00t!

That’s pretty cool.

What it doesn’t account for is the number of “page views” that are the result of referrer spambots. Even using the “rel=nofollow” tag convention subscribed to by all the major search engines hasn’t slowed the steady attempts to use my site for their slimy purposes.

Still 30,000 page views is 30,000 page views.