100,421

Although I’ve been using the personal pronoun a little more often recently, this post will be the most self-regarding for a while.

Earlier today, Google Analytics told WordPress that I had had over 100,000 ‘hits’ – that’s somewhere between 100,000 people visiting one of my pages once to 1,000 people visiting 10 of my pages 10 times.

As humans can’t help assigning meaning to numbers – 100,000 seems more special than 98,425. Your birthday and New Year’s Day are more important than most days of the year, yet today is the first anniversary of 8th January, 2008. Happy birthday if it’s your birthday today.

When I started posting in May 2007, I said that the number of visits doesn’t matter, as long as the right people visit. I had an early success by Norman Hollyn linking his blog to mine. The very definition of the right person.

My next success came when the BBC linked to my site when covering possible revised designs for London’s tube map. Since that link, Google think my pages have some sort of authority and include links to me on the first page of search results on some subjects.

Next I’d like to thank Jean Prytyskacz who kindly got me one of the links of the day on the Internet Movie database, which resulted in over 6,000 hits on one day, which is a great deal for my blog.

It turns out that if you have a reasonable number of posts on a variety of subjects, you’ll still get hits in months with only a single post. In fact posting once a day (as I’ve mostly done since October) might mean that any casual visitor might find the weight of stuff here not worth wading through.

The next unsung heroes are Joe Maller and Andy Mees, two sources of my understanding of how to create plugins for Final Cut Pro. 12 years ago, a link to my site appeared on many pages. Why? Because I gave three free fonts away – and other people knew that pages of links to free stuff were valuable to internet users. So I decided to have a go at making some free stuff that was much more valuable to a smaller group of people – Final Cut users.

Since then I’ve had a few thousand views of my Final Cut page. About 200 people read me via RSS syndication, I think a similar number have this blog bookmarked.

So thank you all, the good news is that mathematics and meaning will tell you that the next post of such self-regarding nonsense will be in 150,000 hits time. Don’t worry, a new blog post will be along in a few minutes time.

Lastly, thank you most of all to my most faithful copy editor, Iris.