1,000,000 Unique Viewers

Sometime within the next hour, the unique view counter on this blog will cross the 1 million mark!

Even though we've been chronicling our travels since October of 2007, we've only been using this blog platform since June of 2008. So the counters that log our reader statistics only date back to that month.

If you scroll down just a little bit, you can see the counters on the right side of this page. There's one for "Pageviews" and there's one for "Unique viewers".

The pageview one counts every page every viewer looks at. For example, during your current visit here, reading this blog post counts as one pageview. If you then look at something we wrote last week, it counts as another pageview. If you come back this afternoon and read something else, it counts as another. And so on.

But the Unique viewer counter will only log your visit one time per day, even if you read a dozen blog posts and return here three times. It counts each day separately, so the 1 million mark reached today is the cumulative total of unique viewers daily since June of 2008.

Here's what it looked like a few minutes ago.

It took us over four years to reach the 500,000 mark. But only just over two years to reach a million. Our readership has been growing steadily, but especially over the last two years. We currently log between 1,000 and 1,500 unique viewers per day.

Thank you all for following along...I wish we could figure out how to give a prize to the one millionth reader!

Edit: There it is! Let the bells ring out and the banners fly...