Earlier this month (on August 7th to be exact), my website turned 12. Yes, I’ve been writing and publishing online since 2000!

I also got two unexpected gifts around the anniversary date. One of my articles got featured on the home page of WordPress.com (in the Freshly Pressed section). It was the second time I was featured, so it felt pretty good. (This was my first featured post.)

Another nice surprise was to see my stats counter fly past 1,000,000 views.

That’s over 1 million views since January of 2010, when I moved my site to WordPress.com. I had been self-hosting a WordPress install prior to that, and before that, my website went through several iterations of static HTML designs and a home-grown blogging engine written in ASP, running off an Access database (it was surprisingly stable). By my own guesstimate, the total number of views on my website since 2000 is somewhere around 10-12 million, if not a lot more. I used to get about 3,000 visits (not just views) per day in previous years.

Web traffic is but one measure of a website’s value. I’m much more pleased by your interactions with my articles and your messages to me, particularly the ones where you tell me how much you like the content I publish here. I do put in a lot of effort into my posts, I’ve done it from the start, and I’m glad when people see the quality.

So, a hearty thank you to all of you who are subscribed, particularly to those of you who are long-time readers! I hope you’ll stick around for another 12 years; I know I will! Cheers! 🙂