Dear Loyal Readers,
On Mar 7 2011 11:50:49 pm, my humble abode on the web notched it’s 500,000th visit!¹ The lucky visitor from Hobart, Tasmania searched Australia’s Google for “free chords jewish music” and stopped by the The Jewish Guitar Chords Archive.

I know what you’re thinking, 500,000 is nothing by today’s standards – even for Jewish blogs – and especially since I’ve been doing this since May 15th, 2003. However, consider the following:

• For various personal reasons I’ve ignored the blog for months at a time intermittently
• I’ve consistently held to my principle that there’s enough garbage on the internet that I don’t need to add to it
• Even my most controversial posts are written carefully so as not to troll or start flame wars
• My loyal readers are intelligent and mature enough not to start flame wars themselves. In the entire history of this site, I’ve had a grand total of one flame war (on the Negiah.org deconstruction) and I received apologies from both parties.

Finally, the 500,000th visit is not the same as a “hit” – as the chart below indicates most visitors to YUTOPIA stick around for a while, either taking time to read what I’ve written or downloading some of the chords from the archive.

 

 

VISITS
	Total	500,000
	Average Per Day	266
	Average Visit Length	4:27
	Last Hour	26
	Today	272
	This Week	1,862
PAGE VIEWS
	Total	1,382,800
	Average Per Day	749
	Average Per Visit	2.8
	Last Hour	76
	Today	767
	This Week	5,243

At any rate, I hope to continue keeping up the quality you’ve all come to expect both in the posts and now the podcasts which I am proud to say have already amassed approximately 5,000 downloads in total.

I thank you for your support and sticking with this site, even sometimes more than I have, and for putting up with my typos and grammar. I don’t have the time for a complete retrospective right now, though I suspect one should be due at some point. In the meantime, thanks again for helping this site achieve a Big Round Number and I look forward to reaching even more with you in the future.

Josh

1. At least since I started counting with Sitemeter – with all the changes I’ve made in the past, odds are I hit the mark a while ago.