10,000 views
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
This iteration of my website is now a year old. It's hard to believe that it's been a full year since I feverishly set to repairing my site after my provider destroyed the database (and my backups!). I can recall hammering away for two days, rebuilding things -- we were in Miyazaki weathering a fierce typhoon at the time.
So much has changed in that time. I've become a dad, I've made some important decisions regarding my career (and acted upon them), I've made a lot of progress with my novel, I learned quite a bit of Japanese, I'm more in love with my wife .. and I've even put on about five kilos (d'oh!). The site's changed, too.
The website continues to drive modest but steady traffic. Currently traffic volumes are way down because I dropped a lot of content and changed the URL's. The search websites dislike it when you do that, and they respond by knocking you down in the rankings (which in turn cuts traffic). But I have very good reasons for the recent purge, and I'm pleased to see traffic inching up again.
This journal has seen 10,000 views in the last year. That's about 25-30 a day! I can't even imagine who all those readers might be (but thanks for dropping in, folks!)
In all, the site's seen 113,000 views in the last year*. Not a lot, given that I was averaging 400,000 a year in times past, but the Internet has changed a lot since this site first went up in 1998**, and surfing to small personal sites like mine has given way to people spending all of their time on 'community' sites.
I've got some interesting plans for the next year. I plan to add my novel to the site, and may have some radically different content in a year's time, including stuff that people can buy. We'll see.
*this number excludes photo views (at least 40,000 views) as well as web crawling 'bots etc.
**Hard to imagine, but what started as a personal section of a corporate intranet I built in '95 has kept on going, it's now been 13 years! This thing was around before blogs, before Google, even before the famous Yahoo! and Netscape IPO's.