Hitting the Jackpot

No money, but perhaps there should be.

I thought I was doing well with the Cartography blog last week when I hit 600 visitors in one day. Not bad, considering most of the time the numbers were between 100 and 250 visitors a day. Yesterday seemed like a good day. When I went to bed at around 10 PM I checked the stats and had about 500 visitors. Great! Second highest amount ever! This morning I checked the stats and thought, at first, that something must be wrong: 7000 visitors (this at 6 AM) today and 5,500 vistors for yesterday. That means 2,500 vistors in the space of an hour. It's now past nooon and the number is closing in on 15,000 for the day. My charts are going to look horrible.

It's a cumulative effect, I guess. The psoting on the Soviet topographic maps got picked up by someone who uses digg.com - a place where users can post interesting stories. If enough people are interested in it it begins to percolate to the top - which is what happened, very quickly, last night and this morning. Now other sites are picking up the story.

It's a flash in the pan, at this stage. I'd expect the numbers to eventually drop down to 300 or so per day my next week. Still, 15,000 people now know about the site. Even if 1% returned on a regular basis that would be great.

And to think that the only thing that has changed about the site is the counter at the bottom.