2003 in Review
Posted 01/02/04
Apologies are due if you're here expecting a political analysis of the year 2003 or somesuch. This page is a look back at Buggrit Online's year gone by. If you're looking for something that rehashes the year's events, look elsewhere. Sorry. :)
I never did a 2002 review page... just wasn't that much to report, and since the site had only been up for a few months (the site began in June 2002) there wasn't much point.
2003 has been much more interesting, though.
I switched servers in October, after our old provider of ten months went out of business, and just ahead of our planned (and aborted) move to an antique dedicated server. The month or so of downtime was due to various time-consuming obligations... my bad.
Does the site really justify a dedicated server? No, not really. The site receives 20-40 visitors per day at the moment, who view between then 50-80 pages a day, and use a ridiculously small amount of bandwith (though it's growing).
Buggrit is now hosted on a FreeBSD machine under Apache. All the pages are compressed by Mod_GZIP to save bandwith and improve page load times... not that it really needs it. I do it more because I can, than because I need to, though I like to think that one person, at least, has noticed how fast the site loads and been pleased. I'm all about geeky service, you know. Okay, actually I'm a miser who doesn't like to pay for more bandwith than necessary...
Google and the search engines it powers (such as Yahoo!) provide the highest number of referrals, followed by MSN, and between them all account for a dwindling percentage of the growing number of visitors to the site. I theorize that this is due to a number of people who have bookmarked the site... but it's just a theory.
The most popular page by a large margin was the Zorki review, due to it's excellent rankings in search engines. Other popular pages were the "practical footwear", "camera snobbery", and "photo quality" pages, as well as the various eBay pages. Of the more political stuff the dirty bomb article was the clear winner in popularity.
A whopping twelve people emailed me this year about pages on this site; half had (all positive) comments on the camera snobbery/photo quality pages, one accused me of being a commie ratfink (I paraphrase), and the rest had various largely meaningless things to say, often only tangenitally related to anything on the site. Only two people contacted me in 2002...
We got into the Open Directory Project after almost a year, and got a link from a thread on photo.net, but otherwise didn't have much in the way of incoming links. Every little bit helps, though. Keep 'em coming... :)
The site had visitors from 51 TLD's, at least 40 countries, at least four of the five branches of the U.S. Armed Forces (no USCG as far as I can tell) as well as the Pentagon and White House, UK and Canadian government sites, including the DOE and DOT, not to mention numerous state and city government sites, and a plethora of nasty big businesses...
Will the site continue to grow? Oh my yes.
2003 was a fun year, and if I don't get arrested in 2004 as some sort of subversive or terrorist, 2004 should be even more fun. After all, it's an election year, and if you thought the last one was bad, well, this one is shaping up to be far, far worse. :)
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