One of the things I did before going “live” with my first board was add code to increment a page-view counter. Initially the code was in includes/page_tail.php but later on it was added to the banner code. I have been actively tracking daily page view activity over the past year or so. I have a nightly script that emails a report of the daily activity to my blackberry every night at midnight. But I had not looked at the cumulative total for quite a while.

Tonight I looked.

It’s over 100M page views for the life of the board.

The board launched in August of 2002. My page counter officially started on August 12^th. On that day we had 2,123 views. On August 15^th, which was the official launch announcement, we jumped all the way up to 8,757 page views for the day. On August 29^th which was the day the mailing list was sent a note about the list being retired we hit 13,155 views, and then 19,441 for the following day. We didn’t come close to twenty thousand daily page views again until the following July, almost a year after the board launched.

Now we are averaging over 100,000 page views daily and have a cumulative total of 107,710,630 as I type this. That’s a lot of database queries!