Lots of the now 303 approved comments on this website are from people I know. Most of the e-mail feedback I receive through and about this website are from people I haven’t met before. And in a few of those replies I was asked about some numbers of this site, which gave me this idea of a peek behind the scenes.
It’s a good moment to do that now, as this site was online for six months at the end of last month. If you look back at the first post, you will see it’s dated the 18th of November, but nobody could read it until the end of December, when the site was launched for public eyes. So, after roughly half a year I had over 12,000 people visiting me and you all came from 94 (!) different countries. Someone once asked me about the ‘log in’ link on this home page, which is really only for me. It takes me to a place where I can write my stories, post my pictures and where I can see from which website you came from. Don’t worry, it doesn’t say who you are, which I think is a good thing.
I’ve yet to come across a wedding proposal through this site, but someone did actually point me to a spelling error once, for which I’m very grateful. But all the messages I received so far, are only about 20 percent of the spam ones I’ve had. And I don’t get it. Do those spammers actually think I’ll approve a message convincing me my – you name it and they’ve sent it – isn’t insured enough yet? And no, I do not want to see any celebrity without their clothes on, really.
Anyway, back to some figures: I have currently 21 pages in total and this will be my 60th post. When I just published a new story, I usually get a bunch of visitors through ‘feeds’ and when someone covered a story somewhere about my Voorwerp, I can tell by the numbers too. Besides that, there’s pretty much a regular amount of people here every day and I don’t look into it much further than that.
When I was in Ireland, I did have a peak in Irish visitors and so did the Galaxy Zoo website. Galaxy Zoo’s technical genius Arfon sent me a figure of how that spike looked. And when I visited him and Chris in Oxford, Chris was so pleased there were ten times (!) more people online on the day of my lecture and even better: that a big part of those people kept coming after it, that he asked where I’d like to be sent off to next (hmm, let’s see…).
I’m not keeping graphics of my own site and there’s not much else to see backstage, but I hope you liked the short tour. Thanks for stopping by and thanks for all the reactions, comments, questions, pictures, stories you’ve shared, interest, compliments and noticing that one little spelling error so far.
