My Site Birthday Went Past And I Didn’t Notice |
|
|
File under Personal
Author: Mike Werner
Location: Normandy, France
|
|
I was rummaging through my archives when I noticed that my news site's birthday had come and gone! Since I started around August 2002 (I can't seem to find the exact date since it's on Blogspot.com and the first entries have disappeared), I've marked the 1st of August 2002 as the birthday of the site. So this motorcycle news site is now 3 years (and a bit) old.
A lot has happened, both to the site and to motorcycles in general.
The site has had over 1050 articles published (that's an average of 1 article a day, 7 days a week). I left Blogspot for a tailor made solution by Steven Castledine who freely donated his content management system, DominoBlog to the community. Steve has been working on the next release of the system, due very shortly. The Domino (IBM/Lotus system) community owes a lot to Steve's efforts!
The new system will offer many new features which I hope to bring to you once I've integrated it. Features like Gravatars (for the regular people who post comments on this site, it means we can put your face with your comment), Podcasts, Email feeding the content (meaning I can email articles when in the field to be posted automatically), etc etc. Many new features, too many to sum up today.
As for access, the site has grown a lot. I've measured at times spikes of over 70,000 individual IP addresses in one day (i.e., over 70,000 people would visit that day), although the average is about 10,000 visitors per day. It's very encouraging for me, since many of you click on the Google ads, meaning some revenue for me to pay for the upkeep and high bandwidth usage.
On the motorcycle front, things have changed as well when looking through my archives. It would seem to me that the motorcycle manufacturers have increased the number of models each year. More and more models are released in a rapid manner. The time-to-market has decreased dramatically. It used to take a year or so when the first spy photos were discovered, now it's a question of months.
When a concept motorcycle was drawn up, usually within a year or so, it would be available on the market.
Technology has changed a lot as well. Bluetooth equipped helmets are now available for almost any brand, ABS is in a very advanced stage, and we now even see airbags on motorcycles (well, just Honda and their Goldwing), Heads Up Display, motorcycle specific GPSs, high performance engines, etc, etc.
All in all, the future looks promising. So far I'm very glad you folks stuck with me and turned this site into one of the biggest news and entertainment motorcycles sites on the web. Now, if only the motorcycle manufacturers would start taking websites more seriously, my life would be easier....
Here's to the next 3 years.....
|
|
|
Click here to Show/Hide 
