Wednesday, 7th February, 2007

Five

tranniefesto anniversary stats

On the seventh of February, 2002, spurred on by a peer-pressure-induced case of "OMG, everyone else has a website", I registered siobhansplace.co.uk and uploaded a hastily cobbled-together set of .html files, including a page called "My Diary" on which I'd planned to document my "Crossdressing Adventures".

I never really thought, at the time, that it would take over my entire life

Now, we can all argue until we're blue in the face as to whether a handful of pages called "My Diary" constitutes a blog or not, and whether or not it was actually the 13th of October that year when I wrote the first script that I actually started blogging ... but the Official Curran Start Date™ (as far as I'm concerned) is 2002/02/07.

And dammit, I'm sticking to that, because I Am A Princess™

The Guardian (or is it The Observer?) do this thing where they throw out a great big list of numbers — interesting statistics and facts to put the world in perspective — and, in true classic blogging style, I'm going to blatantly rip them off and share with you the results of grepping the contents of my source folders, unzipping my old yearly stat-pages, and a judicious use of complex and advanced mathematics (ie. "adding up") ...

 

The complete, total, number of words I've written

How many words per minute that works out as

The number of comments over five years

The number of posts I've made since I started titling them

How many times I said "fuck" (including that one)

How many people got here by typing "crossdressing" into Google

Redesigns

Days that Erin was offline¹

The number of photographs posted from Flickr — 598 from Siobhan, 117 from Kisa

The total number of photographs or images (not counting smiley faces)

Smiley faces (Just the smiley ones, not the winks, the blushes or the 'unsures')

Sad faces

Page views

Gigabytes that Erin's served

Bottles of wine, roughly, give or take a few

How many people have come this way, through some fluke of stumbling, Googling or link-clicking.

 

(Hmm, you know, I think I should have floated the descriptions, not the numbers Ho hum...)

Now, obviously that last figure is deeply questionable — the act of counting site visitors is not an exact science (to say the least). AOL's dammed proxies inflate that total, other people's proxies deflate it. Somewhere, buried in that six hundred thousand or so, are a fair smattering of spambots and spiders that slip through my stat-counter filters. And even though I deliberately underestimated (by chopping a couple of hundred thousand off the total) the number of IP addresses that have sent requests to 81.168.114.66 (and my old IP address), I'm pretty sure that's still too high.

But still, I don't think that really matters. What matters to me is that some people have read this. And hopefully some of those some people have got a little bit of the same things that I've got out of it.

In the past five years, I've been happy, and I've been sad. I've gotten furious at a few things, and I've laughed my tits off at others. I've had little spats with people, and I've made some serious and lasting friendships. I've written things I've regretted, and I've written things I'm deeply proud of.

But most of all, underlying the ranting and the joking and the self-obsession and the digs at friends, I've fucking² enjoyed this.

And I hope yous have too

Thanks for reading guys God, I'm actually getting a bit weepy...

¹ Yes, before anyone says it, I know she was offline yesterday and really this should be the 8th of February. But nyah. You have no idea just how gutted I was when I got into work yesterday morning and couldn't connect.

² Damm. Four hundred and forty three

Ta hon

Still at that SQL thingy? Too much time on your hands?