Two Hundred Thousand Visits!

In 2011, the RevolverMaps widget was installed on the site. At that time, the site was already 4 years old and was the mainstay for everything that had to do with our ... um ... er ... special (yeah, that's it!) group of clan members. Individuals have come and gone. Some have died and been reincarnated (sorry) several times. The core has been around for the duration and it's been a fun ride.

There are some interesting statistics when looking at the details of the visits. First of all is about 20,000 visits have come from either Mountain View, California or Redmond, Washington. Conspiracy theorists would suggest we are being heavily monitored by Google and Microsoft for our nefarious behaviour. Reality would suggest these are Google and Bing indexes being performed on a regular basis. This pretty much rules them out as actual 'visits'.

The second interesting statistic (to me) is we've had at least one visit from 188 'countries'. Again, this is misleading since some are not officially countries while others are from places like 'asia/pacific region' or just '-'. Still, we've pretty much had at least one visit from everywhere on Earth. Again, many probably clicked on a link they thought was something else and hastily left, but we'll take it anyway!

These people had to have come by mistake

The third statistic that caught my eye was that, after the obvious 1-2 punch of Canada and the US, the third country with the most visitors was Australia with 17,200. That's double the fourth country, Great Britain. I guess we strike a chord with our siblings from the other side of the world. Australia, we think you're awesome too.

China made the Top 10, coming in at 7 with 1,700 visits. You'd have thought we'd be censored there. France, Brazil, Mexico and the Netherlands round out the Top 10. 11 is 'Europe', whatever that means.

US is first due to the search indexes

Lastly, there are about 40,000 visits from the Ottawa area, where the large proportion of the clan reside. That means Blackwalt didn't actually visit 150,000 times. It just feels like it.

Since the RevolverMaps widget only came live in 2011, it's safe to say we are well over the 200,000 mark. Still, it's pretty amazing to me that herdofcats.ca, which Blackwalt started 8 or so years ago as a place for a gang of idiots to share inanities has become something that we've shared with the world. In the process we've probably garnered a few fans out there.

As much as he can drive me crazy, the site, the clan and the many friendships developed through it are all thanks to the hard work and tenacious (stubborn?) nature of Blackwalt. And of course the ongoing site sponsor and admin, Q-Bert. Thanks guys, now let's aim for a million.

Collage of HoC Cartoons over the years