ONE MILLION PAGE VISITS in less than 12 MONTHS

22 October 2003

It is with a large slice of gratitude that I announce that Digger History  has now passed the 1 million page visitors mark.

 Not bad seeing it started on 11 November last year.

Although it was originally my concept to bring all of Australia's military history (1788 to 2002) to one place on the web, in an easy to use format, I did not and could not have done it alone.

(I smile now when I remember that I promised them 50,000 visits in the first 12 months and crossed my fingers and hoped that I could deliver).

My thanks also to Chief Warrant Officer 4 Herbert H "Sarge" Booker of California has done huge amounts of work to bring me thousands of images of badges and equipment.

Regular visitors will note that I have now added many pages relating to the military history of New Zealand. One of the things that has always irked me is that Australian historians often forget that to spell ANZAC you need NZ and that New Zealand historians seem to believe that the Kiwi never saw a Kangaroo.

I promised myself that should I ever do something about recording history I would attempt to tell the whole story, using the A and the NZ to spell ANZAC.

To my wife and family, who for 18 months have seen nothing of me except the back of my head framed by a computer screen, I say a big 'Thanks".

Finally, to all of the visitors, Guest book contributors and Digger Forum contributors.

THANK YOU.

Ted Harris, Webmaster

2 Million after only 15 months

3 Million page visitors after 19 months

2nd Birthday marked by the 3,850,000 page visitor milestone.

4 Million page visitors in 2 years and 12 days.

5 Million page visitors in 2 years 3 months 12 days

6 Million page visitors in 2 years 5 months 8 days

7 Million page visits in 2 years 6 months and 28 days

8 million page visits in 2 years, 9 months, 9 days

20 Aug 2005. Our 8,000,000th page visitor dropped in today. That is 71 days since the 7 million mark. That means that from 19 Aug 2004 to 20 Aug 2005 5 million pages visits were logged.

9 Million page visits in 2 years 11 months & 10 days

10 Million page visits in 3 years 1 month & 1 day

12 Dec 2005. We welcomed our 10 millionth page visitor, 52 days after the 9 millionth.

11 Million page visits in 3 years 2 months & 19 days

   Explaining Statistics.

• There are many statistics available to judge the performance of a site or a page.
  • Each page can be counted separately or you can count all visitors to the site.
    • I choose to count total visitors to the site.
• You can choose to count each visitor as 1 regardless of the number of pages he looks at or you can count a visitor who look at 5 pages as "5 page visits".
  • I count page visits in the belief that someone who looks at 5 pages is more interested than someone who looks at 1. I need to know how much interest there is in the viewing audience for my project. (I invest huge amounts of time into it, if it is of little interest to people I can go and improve my golf handicap).
• A visitor who comes back for a second visit can be ignored or counted.
  • I count returning visitors for 2 reasons:
    • They are casting a vote of confidence if they return so should not be ignored.
    • With a very large site (over 2,000 pages) it is impossible for a visitor to take in the whole site in one sitting.
      • Not counting visitors who have been before requires that I put a "cookie" on your machine to mark you as a previous visitor. I HATE COOKIES, so I am not going to start adding them to your machine. (if you know what a cookie is you probably agree, if you don't you should find out, NOW, and then find out how many hundreds are already on your machine).
• You can count "hits" or "page views". 
  • I count "page views". For this reason:
    • A "hit" is recorded every time the programme pulls down text or an image. If a page has 12 images and 24 bullets on it the "hits" will number, in total, 37. 1 for the text file, 12 for the image files and 24 for the bullet files.
      • At that rate, if I counted "hits" I could claim hundreds of millions. As it is I claim only what the Microsoft FrontPage counter recognises as page views, and that does NOT include large versions of an image, or bullets or images. Just text files.
• There can be (and usually is) a big difference between the results of different counters. 
  • The chart below, from Cpanel, shows that a respected third-party counter lists Digger History at 7.63 million page visits in 2005 up to mid September. The FrontPage counter that I use only claims 8.4 million since November 2002.