. . .and I thank you for your support.
I'm not a huge blog traffic addict and, in fact, I mostly keep a SiteMeter counter below because I get to see the geographical distribution of our readers. They have a great map feature where you can look at the locations of the last 100 or 500 hits and I love to see folks from Perth, Australia, Jawa Timur, Indonesia, or Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada.
At 1229 GMT on 10 Sept 2008, we received our 200,000th visitor - a reader from Truro, Nova Scotia - to whom I owe some Alexander Keith IPA (e-mail me to redeem your gift!).
After looking back at my original visitor logs, I was amazed when I reached 10 visitors per day in late 2006. I've said this in numerous settings but after I taught classes of 130-140 students, I'd consider this blog a rousing success if I ever reached 130-140 visitors per day. We don't scream (too much) here about politics or start flame wars; we rarely use the word "framing" and we tend to try and find the good in all of our bloggy colleagues. I have enough conflict in my life so I use the blog to share with you the goodies that I find or at least try to protect you from medical charlatans.
Not to dwell too much on our slow progress but getting to 100K took us 538 days; however, the next 100K has "only" taken 287 days, thanks to you.
Yes, yes, I'm well aware that Drudge gets 100K hits every 9-11 minutes and PZ Myers gets 100K every day. But we here at Terra Sigillata World Headquarters™ aim to please the most discriminating of readers, those with a respect and admiration for natural product pharmaceuticals and a penchant for the off-topic posts I am increasingly putting up.
To have this audience is an honor - so please feel free to delurk and fire back a comment on what topics you might want addressed.
Oh, and Hi Mom - we'll webcam in with you this weekend since the PharmKid is currently sleeping.
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w00t! Well deserved, my friend.
Congratulations!
And of course it's not just the quantity of the readers, but the quality, right?
"to whom I owe some Alexander Keith IPA "
Would it be foolish of me to drive 2000 miles to hang out in an internet cafe in Nova Scotia and pretend to be the 200,000 reader just to get a beer?
I didn't think so...
Congrats
Congratulations! So glad to be counted among your lurkers.
Talk with you this weekend. Love, Mom
Neat! Your 200,000th visitor is from my neck of the woods... well, an hour's drive; that's close around here.
If you do get the chance to have a beer with buddy from Truro, do enjoy the rest of Nova Scotia while you're there. We give awesome sea/landscape.
And congrats on your good blogging.
Congratulations! So glad to be counted among your lurkers.
Talk with you this weekend. Love, Mom
How awesome is that! I gotta get my Mom to comment to on my blog.
Congratulations. 200K is a quite large number - we just tend to forget because we hear the huge numbers from people like PZ (still I remember back in the days when he got that kind of numbers - he was quite happy)
Thanks all. With the first comment from one of my very early blog mentors, Coturnix, I should note that he recently hit 3 million pageviews and we both started the same time here at ScienceBlogs (our 200K visits translates into just over 300K pageviews, so we're about 1/10th the level of the master Coturnix).
Liz, you are one of my highest-quality readers and fave bloggers. Your Friday roundup referrals usually rank The Pump Handle as one of my top five referral sites.
Chemgeek, I'll still be happy to receive one of your latest homebrews from the Cornelius system!
As I said, Mom, it's been such a crazy week that I missed the milestone by two days. The PharmKid got your lovely presents from the Alaska trip. Sorry that you had to suffer up there through Palinmania.
Bee, I loves me my Canada so I'd truly welcome the chance to get up to Nova Scotia and take in the beauty over some fine ale or eiswein.
JuniorProf, the story is this: when I'm a thoughtless son and neglect to call Mom for a couple of weeks (or plan to videocam her granddaughter and don't follow through), it is wise to use the blog to tell Mom that you've been busy and that even though you're putting up a post, you haven't forgotten about her and will catch up when the time difference allows you to while negotiating the bedtime of the PharmKid. Now if we can only get our Moms to comment on each others' blogs.
Kristjan, as you note, PZ does not forget those days and still understands by using his readership to promote other bloggers who deserve attention. In fact, Herr Professor put up a post way back when to congratulate us at 100,000.
Often reading but seldom commenting lately...congratulations on the milestone!
Wow, I'm really late to this party. But congratulations! :)