You like me! You really like me!

3 June 2004

Last Wednesday was what the cool kids call my “blogiversary”, the anniversary of the first scintillating nugget of prose that appeared on this blog. In honor of this august occasion, I will, for this one posting, drop the pretense that I don’t care about how many people are reading my work.

I wrote a crude one-line script that digs through my Web server’s access logs, picks out the hits in a given month that are most likely from actual human beings reading the site rather than spiders or other bots, and counts the unique IP addresses that the hits are coming from. Here are the results for the year ending May 31:

(22 people read this blog via its LiveJournal syndication feed, and about 20 others read it through other syndicators. However, I suspect that most of these readers, at some point during every month, click through to see the continuation of an article directly on the Web site.)

If we assume, conservatively, that most people who read yesh omrim read it both at home or at work, and some people have dynamically assigned IP addresses, then every IP address represents a little under half a reader, so we had at least three hundred readers in May. Compared with, say, Atrios, that’s small potatoes, but I don’t think I could name three hundred people who know me personally, so I must be doing something right here.

Thank you all for coming! Please let me know how I can serve you better! And remember, a permalink to a yesh omrim posting is low in carbs, complements any decor, and is made from 100% recycled electrons. It’s the perfect gift for all your friends, relatives, and e-mail lists.

OK, back to the pretense.

• Later: The libel of a thousand scratches
• Earlier: A tale of two crooks