2005 in Review


Posted 01/01/06



Much like the 2003 year in review page, this page is not a review of goings-on in the world, but a review and wrap-up of the website's year. Highly meta, and a little narcissistic, but, hey...

At the beginning of 2005, this website had fifty pages; by year's end that had grown by fourteen, which is pretty impressive - better than one update a month. In addition, a handful of pages got updated. Evidently this was a pretty productive year for me, to judge by this site and my contributions to the TCUEC and the group-blog Entropic Memes.

In 2003, the then much smaller site averaged about 35 visitors and about 50 page views a day. Today, it sees an average of 125 visits, and 175 page views, per day, though there were some notable exceptions. Thanks to the wonders of output compression, this winds up being just over half a megabyte of data per day. Not terribly impressive sounding, until you consider that's all text - there's not a single image on this site - and it's almost all compressed. In addition, this not being a blog as most would recognize it, there are no RSS feeds or other kinds of syndication to consume (useless) bandwidth. Without compression, the daily transfer for this site would be roughly trebled.

As part of a reorganization, or upgrade, or something, the site was switched between servers in October. It produced a small but noticable speed improvement, which probably helped during the pre-election days.

Due to a number of factors, the two pages I wrote about then-Mayor of the city of Saint Paul, one Randy Kelly, ranked extraordinarily well in many popular search engines. Local interest in the mayor, who was up for reelection, as well as national interest - thanks to his controversial endorsements of Dubya back in 2004 - drove quite remarkable levels of traffic to those pages, sometimes on the order of 300, even 500, visitors per day - just to those two pages. This peaked in November, naturally, and has declined since, though not completely gone away. I like to imagine I helped to sway one or two voters into voting against the corrupt little weasel, but I'm most likely kidding myself. :)

Search engines are still the number-one source of traffic for Buggrit, accounting for some 85% of all visitors. Despite, or perhaps because of that, a number of links were forthcoming from newsgroups, forums, blogs, and other websites, which produced greater or lesser amounts of traffic.

The two pages on King Randy were the clear winners in popularity; the remaining traffic was fairly evenly distributed between twenty or so of the remaining pages, with a combination of old and new articles getting heavy traffic.

There's really not much more to say. Buggrit is now more than three years old, a veritable eternity on the Internet, and all signs seem to point for a productive and interesting fourth year online...



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