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.

I couldn’t resist posting these excellent abuses of Adobe Photoshop:

As a side note, this site is celebrating its ninth birthday today. That’s insane. Try and think back nine years and remember what you were doing. I was apparently being anti-social and designing a web site.

I just upgraded to the newest version of WordPress (v1.5 - which is incredible, by the way), and my old template files seem to have gone kaput. While I work on fixing them, enjoy this temporary black template for my site. Any ideas what that photograph is at the top? I have no clue. And I’m apparently not the only one who has had fun with the upgrade!

Update: It’s all fixed now! But, I think I’m getting the itch to do a redesign…

Happy 2005! To the right is a photo that was taken seconds after 2005 started in Times Square, New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II) It was actually the 100th anniversary of the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebrations and nearly 750,000 people came to enjoy the fun, which was a bit shy of the two million in 2000. The celebration was originally started to commemorate the renaming of the square from ‘Longacre’ to ‘Times’ in 1904, in case you wanted a little tidbit to share at cocktail parties.

Random: I think Zach Braff (of Garden State/Scrubs fame) has the best New Year’s resolution list I’ve seen yet.

I’m working with a new piece of software, WordPress, to power my blog since I was tired of having to recode my home-grown blog software every time I wanted to do something new. The nerd in me is shedding a small tear as the hand coded blog I have used for almost five years will be laid to rest. *sniffle* You can still find all of the site links on the right hand side of this page, and every other page not related to this one will have the old look and feel until I figure out what to do about that. I finally have the WordPress stuff working within my old template.

I’m working with the new features, such as categories, open comments, and permanent blog links. Give ‘em a try!