Thanks for reading

by Volker Weber

One of the things I need to do in order to keep the site alive and healthy is to keep a check on the amount of traffic it generates. That is why every other day I look at web server logs for traces of abuse.

I remember very well when my logs showed a million hits a month for the first time. Now I am watching how many days it takes to get to a million. This month it happened yesterday. I still find this absolutely amazing. Sometimes I wish more people would come out and comment, but I understand that my requirements to leave a working mail address and your full name keeps most readers out of sight.

Thank you so much for reading. And thank you very much for contributing your comments. It makes all the difference.

Comments

Congratulations. I love your blog. Keep up the good work.

vowe, I appreciate your views and guest posts (where is Cem?). Keep rocking! And Bruce, I like seeing you here, too. :-)

i

i *heart* you, vowe

Thanks for writing! :-)

Gruss, Ulli

Thanks for being one of my "more than once a day" sites... :-)

Oliver Schult, 2008-01-11 07:58

Volker, it is YOU who makes the difference :-)

I agree to all the comments before and I must say, giving my real name to all and my e-mail address just to you (and in case of guest editors, the author of the post) is something that I can totally live with. It may keep some serious comments from being posted, but it also keeps tons of garbage out so I'm absolutely certain that the trade-off is a good one.

Thanks for investing all the effort, it's really worth it (and looking what my own site looks like I don't even want to know how much time you spend on yours ;-)).

I would comment more often but my Grandad told me "better to stay quiet and be thought a fool than to speak and confirm it."

Keep up the good work

JOhn Mill, 2008-01-11 08:43

Yap, thank you Volker.

Concerning the real name thing: originally I regretted to meet this requirement since I thought my nickname (Parcival) says more about me than my real one. However, now that I read blogs for quite a while I have to say that it's Volker's site where you feel the most like talking to "real people".

1 million hits or page views?

Thank you for every single thread. :-)

Christian Tennigkeit, 2008-01-11 09:53

the older the better:)

Brian, hits for php and html URLs. Page views are hard to track from looking at server logs.

Interesting development though: subscription services like Bloglines, Google Reader, Netvibes or NewsGator. This is a good thing since they only need to fetch the RSS feed once, and then make it available to hundreds of readers and more. I am watching these carefully and see a tremendous growth in Google Reader subscriptions.

Robert, das heißt: "Je älter, desto langsamer. Je langsamer, desto besser."

John - I would comment more often but my Grandad told me "better to stay quiet and be thought a fool than to speak and confirm it."

Yes had the same teachings - very English I think. Damn I've broken the rule.

Incredible amount of hits - must take a lot of time to keep feeding them.

first: congratulations

>but I understand that my requirements to leave a working mail address and
>your full name keeps most readers out of sight.
I don't think it's your requirements. I often find myself reading your (also other!) blog(s) with a great post but with absolutely no reason to comment.
I think it's better to stay silent than just posting some $foobar with no content.

As a side note - where should be the problem with publishing your real name? Don't want that someone knows that _you_ wrote the comment? Then think about if you should really post it...

I also think there´s no problem leaving the full name here and the email address (as long it´s not used as a link :-)).

One million php and html URLs? That really equals one million page views. That ´s a impressive number.

I was also interested what hits actually meant, ´cause I try not to use that term anymore and instead use page views and visits/visitors. These are much more reliable numbers. I once read a book about web statistics, which had an interesting quote regarding hits: "hits means ´how idiots track success´" - relating to measuring hits to images.

How many page views (or php and html hits) do you then get per month? I guess you could compare your blog to commercial sites.

Adalbert, commercial sites are much bigger. SchülerVZ for instance gets more than 5 billion (Milliarden) page impressions. But vowe.net is doing pretty well for a site which runs in shared hosting.

'how idiots track success'. That is a good one. :-) I am actually trying to track cost. That is why I am constantly optimizing technical aspects of the site to serve more pages with the same amount of bandwidth. I also try to keep CPU and memory utilization low by balancing off static and dynamic content. Small confession: that is why I force you into the preview page. It would be too expensive to generate the CAPTCHAs for normal page views.

Congrats.

Leaving my email address and name has never been a problem, but then again, I've never really had a problem with having my online activities traceable back to me. I think it helps when commenting to know that we're all (mostly) who we say we are on here.

The last bit of 2007 stopped most of the posting I've been doing online, including blogging. I'll be back soon, for better or for worse. :P

And the construction preview page fellowed by CAPTCHAs keep away the standard comment spammer?

Not sure what you mean. Yes, the CAPTCHA keeps comment spam away. This site is much too unimportant to crack this mechanism. And the bounty is small, since all comment links are "nofollow".

Yes, I know that commercial sites can get much, much more.

I meant small commercial sites.

Interesting. StudiVZ and SchülerVZ both get 5300 million page views, but SchülerVZ has less visits (98 million, StudiVz: 153 million) - so those pupils klick much more per visit than students. T-Online has only 2650 million page views.

So still a long way to go, Volker! :-)

The younger you are, the more time you have.

Re: long way. I am very happy with the way things are. Don't want to be alone, but also do not need any growth.

This is the best blog I never read - or is it a 'not a blog' that I do read. Either way - danke!

Dan Solomon, 2008-01-14 05:33

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Ceci n'est pas un blog

vowe.net is a personal website published by Volker Weber a.k.a. vowe. I am an author, consultant and systems architect based in Darmstadt, Germany.

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