The Cipher Mysteries stats to date: 568 posts – 16 static pages – 100,155 visits – roughly 190,000 page loads – 1775 comments – 115 subscribers. Thank you all very much for your continued interest, support, comments (both appreciative and snarky), tweets, and off-line posts and notes (always interesting). Just so you know, most referrals continue to come from Google with only one Slashdot-style traffic superspike (2nd-3rd December 2009, 5000 visits in one day), while the Akismet anti-spam plugin has caught 16,151 spam messages with only 9 false positives (mainly comments from hotmail.com).
It’s also nice to see more cipher mystery bloggers popping up: a big tip of the hat to Elmar Vogt, Elias Schwerdtfeger, Julian Bunn, Diane O’Donovan, Rich SantaColoma, Moshe Rubin, etc (in no particular order). Good luck to all of them (blogging is surprisingly hard work).
As for Cipher Mysteries itself, there’s plenty I’d like to fix: the front page needs a makeover to make it more useful for first-time visitors; the web hosting performance has slowly worsened (but moving such a large database to a new host is proving time-consuming and difficult); and I have a slow-burn plan to get the visit count to 1,000,000 and beyond. But I’m busier than ever in my real-world work, so all in good time, eh?
I have several weeks’ worth of draft posts to finish, and am still working away on an entirely new historical cipher mystery that I suspect will ultimately be more surprising and revealing than the Voynich Manuscript: but I’ll leave that as a ncie surprise for another day. Thanks you all again! 🙂
Well, now you’ve done it, Nick. You have officially piqued my interest. Happy now? Feel good about yourself? I hope you do, because you are the most interesting blogger on the Internet. I salute you, sir.
Christopher: a little bit of flattery is always nice, though it is not yet a powerful enough force to get me to reveal the next big cipher mystery. 🙂
When it comes to the next big cipher mystery, I am full in denial mode, but I raise a glass to this blog and its author!
Rene: without being too cryptic, there are three or four literatures that are also in full-on denial about it. But, frankly, I know a cipher when I see it… 🙂
I raise a virtual glass of Vino Voynich vintage 1438 and toast your milestone.
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You deserve a Hermitage shiraz 1982 at least. And I’ll drink to that.
Congratulations on your 100k hits Nick… it is an interesting blog, with much to offer. I’m sure I represent a couple hundred of those hits, myself. All the best… Rich.
Rich: actually, it’s had 100k visits – closer to 190k hits. And because that’s not counting when subscribers read an emailed copy of a page off-line too, the actual figure could be 2x that again. 🙂 Cheers!
Oh sorry Nick… I did not know the difference between a “hit” and a “visit” then. I only read the visitor counter above, at over 100k. Well then… let me be the first to congratulate you on almost 200k hits… keep up the good work! Rich.