I’m a sucker for site stats. I love to know as much about who visits here and why, and how often. It feeds my ego, its true. :)
First, for those who may be new, and there are a few of you, some history about walljm.com. The sites name is derived from my own name in the manner of the common network admin username system of taking the 5+2 last name, first and middle initial. Walljm was my username in college.
The site was first conceived and put up in January of 2001, a mostly static site to showcase my photography. I didn’t do much with it until a year later when it was made over into a weblog, just as the blog revolution was getting started. Though not a first comer, I was an early adopter, of which fact I am proud.
Since then walljm.com has gone through several redesigns and a number of significant changes. The site is built with custom code using vbscript and asp, the languages I knew at the time, largely because microsoft was the only platform I had freely available to me. The CMS is not slick (though I was using ajax like techiques two years before it was popular [yes, this is me bragging]), nor is the code that generates the site especially pretty, but I like it. The reason I haven’t migrated to one of the popular and robust blogging engines available is two fold. The first is that in spite of the flexibiliy offered by both MovableType and WordPress, neither are quite as flexible or perfectly suited to the exact needs of walljm.com. Its like an old pair of comfortable shoes, my data is clean and enjoyes a robust data model. The second reason is that walljm.com was first conceived as a space to learn, practice and keep myself informed of technilogical trends. Walljm.com is largly responsible for my understanding of programming languages, web usabilty, html, css, and javascript.
In the intervening 5 years since walljm.com has been my home of the web, I have written 695 blog posts, posted 550 photographs, composed 123 poems, created 8 wallpapers, and posted 77 links. Not bad. At one point in time, walljm.com enjoyed just about 200 average visits per day. But like many bloggers, life for me got complicated and in August of 2004, I put walljm.com on hiatus, and naturally, traffic fell off. Walljm.com came back in June 2005 and I have been posting strong ever since. In January on this year, walljm.com was getting around 19 visits a day. Since then, there has been a steady increase in traffic, and I am now averaging 56 visits a day. At the current rate of growth, if it continues, I will reach my previous level of traffic in about a year. Here is a graph of the traffic over the last three months:
My most visited post in that time has been, Pop Goes the Sternum! or How I Had My Pectus Excavatum Corrected, the Aftermath, and the most visited photograph is Daniel and Jennifer on the Night Before, Liberty, SC I might also ad that 73% of my traffic is for the photography.
60% of my traffic each day are new visitors, down from 75% at the start of January, which means that some of you who find my site are sticking around and coming back. I just want to say thanks to all of you who come by and feed my ego. ;) I like creating for an audience. That is largely what drove me to come back from my hiatus, and what motivates me to improve the site and to continue to post photos. So thanks!