Four years ago, on December 5th, 2005, I installed Mint on my domain host and started accurately tracking visits to my site. This morning at about 7:30 am the 50,000th page was served to the 26,620th unique visitor.
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Obviously my little personal site is way out on the power curve of the World Wide Web, but nonetheless it pleases me to see my numbers increasing. A rough count of the visits in the last 12 months adds up to nearly 22,500, meaning the rate of visits in accelerating here at Zanshin. If the same rate of acceleration continues throughout the next twelve months I should see 100,000 or more a year from now.
50,000 in this case means pages served by my host to some browser. Kind of like McDonald’s billions and trillions served signs, only fewer. The 26,620 unique visitors really means 26,620 unique sessions on my site. If you visit my site, look at a page or three and then leave that is a unique session. If you go to another page, say google.com and then come back, that would be a new unique visit. Sticking with the McDonald’s analogy, one trip through the drive-thru lane followed by a lap around the building and another drive-thru lane excursion would be two unique visits. All this really means is that most people look at 1.87 pages per visit to my site.
The most popular postings here fall into the “how to” genre. The most popular posting is Installing PostgreSQL on Mac 10.6, closely followed by Using jQuery to Create an iGoogle Style Drag-and-Drop. These type of postings are fun to create, and since they attract visitors I’m planning on more of them in the future.
What’s fascinating about these how-to style postings is the geographic diversity of the visitors. I regularly have visitors from India, Germany, Russia, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Australia, and even more obscure places like Iraq and Vietnam.
The newest edition to the suite of sites under the zanshin.net umbrella is Solfège, my site about learning to play the violoncello. While it’s only been around for a couple of weeks it already has nearly a dozen postings and several pages dedicated to my experiences learning to play music.