Ye Olde Rad Blog

Last month of the year before we head into 2004. RADIFIED set a new site record last month with nearly 1.3 million hits. See here. Actually, hits is a rather meaningless metric. For example, when you load the home page, you generate 9 hits:

* 1 for the HTML page itself, which contains the text (25-KB)
* 1 for the "RADIFIED" graphic at the very top, with its cool, 3-D drop-shadow effect (5-KB)
* 1 for the "Indulge Your Technolust" graphic located right below it (also drop-shadow, 6-KB)
* 1 (4) for *each* translation flag located in the upper right-hand corner (4). They are all different:

Italian:
German:
French:
Spanish:
All four together total less than 1-KB.

* 1 for the little yellow radiation tri-blade symbol: (0.5-KB) Once your browser loads the graphic (one file), it can be displayed as many times as necessary (once for each new day).
* 1 for the associated CSS cascading style sheet (radified.css, 3-KB), which contains all the formatting info that makes the home page look so darn pretty. Many people have asked to use this style sheet, which is flattering, since 'design' is not really my bag. I try to focus on generating clear *content* that is easy to read and understand. Style sheets allow me to change the design of the entire site by modifying one page. Without which I would have to change each page individually.

Note the Google graphic loads directly from Google, and doesn't count as a hit for RADIFIED, but your web browser will still load it (2-KB).

That is, if you don't already have these files stored in your browser's cache. In which case your browser will load them from there, and not have to "hit" the site. If you visited the site within the last week or so, they are probably still stored in your browser's cache, and won't have to load them from here. (The RADIFIED server is physically located in Atlanta.) If you visit any of the other pages, such as the Ghost guide, you won't have to reload files you loaded from the home page (such as the RADIFIED graphic and translation flags).

I am not selling advertising, so I have no need to artifically inflate the numbers. But some sites embed invisible 1-pixel graphics into their pages. Since a file is a file, each of these tiny, invisible files will give their sites another "hit", which may allow them to demand more advertising revenue from unsuspecting clients.

Number of visitors is a more meaningful metric. Each day, between 5,000 and 7,000 visitors stop by here. Not all come to this page. Some only request the Ghost guide, or the ASPI guide for example. Mondays (today) are traditionally the site's busiest day of the week. Fridays are usually the slowest.

Doing the math, you'll see that (on average) 6,000 visitors per day, times 30 days per month, equals ~180,000 visitors each month .. each generating about 7 hits .. equals (roughly) 1.3 million hits per month .. for a new (rather meaningless) site record. Web masters like to use the "hits" metric because it is the largest number and sounds more impressive than the others. The main point is that the site is growing.

I'm looking forward to the day when the site hits 10,000 visitors a day. Sounds like a nice, round number, doesn't it? That would equal a visit every 9 seconds, 24 hours each day.