Happy eleventh birthday, Upbeat and Downstairs!

This site, in some form or another, was vaulted onto the World Wide Web eleven years ago today. As is customary over the past few years, it’s time for a little ego boost and a quick recap of the hit stats. Drum roll please…

As of yesterday’s logs, this site received roughly 2.3 million hits over the past 52 weeks, from just over 50 countries. That’s right – even French Guiana and Belarus are among the country hit lists. (Spasiba!)

Happy tenth birthday, Upbeat and Downstairs!

This site, in some form or another, was vaulted onto the World Wide Web ten years ago today. Originally started as a small site for links and musings, the site has gone through several iterations and ballooned many times larger in terms of size and content.

In 1996, I’d be lucky if I saw one hit per day that wasn’t me checking out my creation. Now, as of yesterday’s logs, this site receives about 7,000 hits daily and recorded roughly 2.4 million hits last year. Sure, it’s no Yahoo (106 million visitors) or Google (94 million visitors), but I’m pretty happy with it. (Yes, I know a “hit” is not a “visitor”, so it could just be me visiting my page 7,000 times a day. Ha!)

In trying to recall what the Web was like ten years ago, I came across a web site appropriately named “Internet ’96″. On the site, the author takes a look at how the front pages for several popular companies used to look in 1996. Some of them are quite entertaining, and I love the old-school White Castle page. Most companies would quickly fire their marketing firms if they launched anything like that now. But, hey, 80s clothing has come back, so maybe old site designs will, too?

As a matter of fact, I came across an internet archive that has a version of this site from early 1999. It’s … eclectic, to say the least.

What’s next for this site, you ask?

I really don’t know. This site has become a larger hobby than I imagined, and I’m not sure in which direction I’d like to take it. Even though I haven’t updated it as much as I’d like to, I’m not ready to hang it all up yet. Ten years has been a fun ride, and I’m interested to see where the next ten lead. I’d like to hear your comments below.

I’m in the process of making some serious changes to how and where this site is hosted, and have subsequently broken most of the pages except for this one.

Please be patient as I work to fix everything!

Many thanks.

Update: Most of the pages are working now, but the photo gallery is still angry with me. Please let me know via a comment on this post if you notice any other problems.