I am technically two days late. It’s not that I forgot, it’s that I’ve been too busy. This is a pretty busy time of the year for me.
But, it has also been a pretty busy time of the year for the site!
Wow, have things changed. We’re now two months old and we’re growing quickly.
As you may know, I prefer to be as open as I can be with regards to information about the site. Last month, I took the time to write one of these progress reports and it was generally well received. So, I’ll do it again.
We now have 66 published articles. You get a new article every day, at 16:30 Eastern. It looks like we’ll be able to keep this publication rate up for quite a while.
These next numbers are a little fuzzy…
In the past 30 days, we’ve had just about 2,000 visitors. Yup. We’re getting a lot of views.
Those visitors have visited just about 5,400 times. Yes, we display a lot of pages and many of you like to visit more than once. We like that. We love repeat visitors.
In the past 30 days, Little Eva’s song “Loco-motion” has surged into the number one spot. In those 30 days, that article was viewed 153 times.
The spam (you don’t see it, ideally) has dropped significantly now that I banned an entire block of IP addresses originating in Russia. This doesn’t mean it was Russians. It just means that’s where the servers are located.
In the past month, we’ve been attacked 101 times. Yup… We’ve had 101 attempts to break into the site. From the logs, none of them were successful. No, I will not be going into details about the specific methods we use for protection and detection.
The forum has been a bit sluggish. There have been some excellent comments added by our guests. Our visitors are pretty awesome and their stories are very much appreciated. Their stories are exactly why this site is here. This site is for telling those stories and keeping that history alive.
So, don’t be afraid to tell us your story – even if you think it might be insignificant. We have pretty loose standards for publishing comments (the first couple of times you comment, it may need us to review them). So far, we’ve published all of them – except for spam.
At the moment, we’re not in need of donations or any financial support. We have ads and they don’t look like they’re going to cover the expenses, at this time. But, they do seem to be improving and, for the time being, there’s no need to donate.
If there’s any major interest in donation, or if we do decide we need to go that route, we’ll figure something out. For now, that’s not a concern. The main goal with the ads is to make the site self-funding, that way it can keep running in perpetuity and if something should happen to both of us.
Google’s Ad rules specifically prohibit me from asking you specifically to click an ad. However, I will say that it’d be pretty awesome if you’d whitelist us in your ad-blocking software.
Surprisingly, only about 50% of you appear to be using ad-blocking – at least that’s what Google tells me. I don’t let them collect the full metrics, just the ads. They compare page views with the number of displayed ads, and that’s how they get that number.
I’d like to use Google’s analytic stuff, but it’s a bit intrusive, so I just have a more rudimentary form going on here. We absolutely don’t track you off the site – but we can see where you visit while you’re on this site. We kind of have to know where to send the packets, so we know what pages you viewed and we know what IP address you’re using.
We don’t really have a whole lot of information about you and that information, inasmuch as is possible, stays here with us. When we link to a video, they’ll know you watched it. When we display an ad, they’ll know you saw it. When you leave a comment, your data stays with us. When you sign up for an account, your data stays with us.
And, if you haven’t noticed, we take security pretty seriously. We take protecting your information as a great responsibility. That’s partially ’cause I’m lazy – and I really don’t want to have to clean up that mess! It’s also because we don’t want to know more than you tell us.
For a good example, I don’t know your passwords and couldn’t figure them out if I wanted to. I have no way to know your password if you sign up for an account. We don’t store passwords. Your password is salted (given a random element) and hashed (adjusted by an algorithm) and then it’s stored in the database. We don’t store passwords in plain text.
That also means I can’t tell you what your password is, should you forget it. Nope. I can help you reset it (you can also just do that yourself). I can change it to something on your behalf, but I’m probably not going to unless you can demonstrate that you’re really you – and you’d have to use your email to do that. If you can use your email to do that, you can reset your own password!
But, I guess my point is that the site is going well.
Last month, when I wrote this, we had just 1200 visitors and this month we’re at 2000. We’re only two months in and we’re already getting traffic that similar sites would love to have. I see no reason why we won’t continue to increase our number of visitors.
If you do want to help, you can share the site with other people. I’ve tried to facilitate this with those silly icon things. If you click ’em, they do stuff and make it easy for you to submit the site to other sites. I haven’t actually done it… But, I have it on good authority that it works and is easy!
So, that’d help. The more eyes and stories, the more the history comes to life. If you know people who might be interested, send ’em here to read the site.
Finally, if you’ve written an email and I’ve not gotten back to you – that’s because I’m insanely busy. It’s 03:00 and I might get three hours of sleep tonight, before I’m out of the bed and hard at work again. This is a VERY busy part of the year, for reasons we won’t get into because this site is not meant for that.
I’ll continue to do these progress reports for as long as people are interested in seeing them AND so long as I have time to do them.
Thank you for taking the time out of your busy lives to visit us daily and to read the information that we’ve shared with you. That’s what makes this all worthwhile.
Visits: 57