General: One Million Viewers

Wow! Last month I announced that my blog was close to reaching one million pageviews. Since then I've had a mixture of quiet days and busy days; in short, it was a normal month. This morning when I woke up, it looked like being another slow day. My reader count was 999,682 when I went to bed at midnight, and it was only 999,753 when I woke up at 7:30 am. I checked the statistics a few times during the day, more often that I usually would, but the pageviews were trickling in slowly. I took my grandson to the playground in the afternoon, planning to check the statistics again when I returned. I thought that I could sit in front of the computer for a few hours, watching the statistics slowly climb.

Then I got home, and bam! There had been a big surge in my pageviews while I was out of the house. 59 readers between 3pm and 4pm, 189 readers between 4pm and 5pm. My pageview count was at 1,000,062. I tried to figure out who pushed me over the limit, but I can only make vague statements. Google's statistics supply the nationality of my readers and what's been read. The readers between 4pm and 5pm came from a typical random mix of countries, but the majority of the readers were from America and Romania. There were a lot of hits on my Javascript code for sorting posts alphabetically and a surprisingly high number of hits on "Bikini Chain Gang". Apart from that, nothing stood out.

Unless one of my readers leaves a comment claiming to be my millionth reader, it's just speculation on my part. The important thing is that I did it. Tonight I'll celebrate. No, I shan't be drinking champagne. I just used the picture because I liked it. I'll drink a glass or two of good German wine. There's still a small amount of Besigheimer Felsengarten Samtrot Spätlese in the bottle that I opened on Wednesday. That's enough for a start.

Here's to the next million!