The moment passed unnoticed, and I’m not sure exactly when it happened … but sometime near the start of this year this website received its one millionth visitor.

I only noticed this milestone when transferring website statistics into a spreadsheet, something I do only occasionally. Accurate numbers are missing for parts of this site’s ten year history, but the steadiness of visitor numbers means I can be fairly confident that the one million total was reached within a month or two either side of the start of 2009. Not hits, or page views, but unique visitors - actual humans visiting this site (repeat visits within each month are filtered out).

My mind boggles a little - this is just a non-commercial, hobby-related personal website which I’ve hardly ever promoted. I can credit the visitor traffic mostly to the page about my navel lint collection, which has been referred to by numerous other websites and media stories over the years. In fact, as of today, there are 2786 websites linking to my navel lint page, according to Google - a testament to the popularity of things considered weird. What encourages me more is knowing there are another 2100 websites out there linking to pages on my site other than the navel lint page.

If only earning the first million dollars was as easy as accumulating the first million website visitors … if it were so, I might have been reporting this via satellite from an Antarctic cruise ship!

Thank you for visiting.