Saturday, March 31, 2012

Ten Million Hits

Every counter gets big with time. Today's big news is that the hit counter on the Community Directories is likely to cross the ten million page view mark some time today. (NOTE, I've lost some of the hit counter data through the years).

Revenuewise, to provide a single minimum wage job, the directory would need about ten million hits per year, not per decade.

To celebrate 10,000,000 page views, I decided to take a peek at the data the site collected: The Link Report says the directory has 23,328 active links, I've deleted 8,866 links. Ten million divided by (23,328+8866) is 310.6 page views per link.

In the first quarter of 2012, I've added 1042 links and deleted 512 dead links. My guess is there's another thousand broken links in the directory.

I track hits on a small subset of the links. The average for the link hit counters is 93.4. The hits per link is, of course, a matter of time. Those added in 2002 average 700 hits. Those added in 2011 have had only a dozen or so hits.

The most important visitor to my site is the Googlebot and other webcrawlers.

There are other pages on the site. The Site of the Day reviews have received several million page views. The calendars and mobile versions of the site have received a steady stream of hits.

So, while few people visit the site, the program does a public good having the googlebot index local community oriented sites. It would be nice if people linked to their community directory. The directories give exposure to small local businesses and organizations that tend to be overshadowed in our world of big business and big government.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

A Tale of Two Crowds

I added new photos. On Friday, I went to the sparsely attended Stand Up For Religious Freedom Rally at the Courthouse, then to a massive crowd at the new City Creek Center in downtown Salt Lake.

First the pictures of the rally: The first picture shows the crowd which is about three people deep. My guess is that 150 to maybe 200 people were at the rally. This is maybe half the size of Salt Lake's Occupy Rally.
Stand Up for Religious Freedom Rally
Speaking at the Event
Crowd at the Rally
There was a huge crowd for the second day of the new City Creek Center. The new center has two decks running for two city blocks with both floors and shops filled with spectators.

Main Mall Fanzz ZCMI Facade A Creek Runs Through It
I admit. I've been feeling sad. I used to work for a state owned insurance group. I quit because I realized that group funded health care (both socialism and private insurance) dramatically under serve the people. For the last three years I've been trying to get people to talk about alternatives funding mechanisms for health care. For some odd reason, people are unwilling to talk about the definitive issue of or day. It's maddening.