Today, five years ago, this website was launched.
I produce all this in my “spare” time and thank you, all who visit here, for your support and encouragement. Let us continue to pray for each other, and all who visit here. The large number of people who visit and find it useful, the comments and sharing of ideas and resources are a real encouragement.
The first snapshot on the wayback machine (a “back up” of all the internet) shows a rather clunky website – but a lot of the basic elements are there. During the last year I requested ideas for improvements – and these were incorporated where possible. It took four years to get to a million visitors. In the last year there have nearly been a half a million more – and the site was out of action for some weeks after the Christchurch earthquake; and only today recovered its google page rank (PR 5 for the home page, 4 for the blog). Yesterday, an ordinary day, two and a half thousand people visited, and used four thousand pages.
There is an associated facebook page (over 3,000 “likes”) and a twitter profile (about 77,000 followers). I think this is the most visited Christian site/blog based in New Zealand. Surprisingly (to me at least) the liturgy twitter profile is the second most-followed twitter profile based in New Zealand. Now tell me there’s no interest in worship and spirituality!
Recently, the facebook page needed a category. The one proposed by people was “community”. There has been facility to add comments here now for about three years. Other sites have flame wars and ad hominems. Here a healthy culture of respect has developed. People can agree and disagree without fear of being put down. [There are, as with any popular site, a lot of spam comments – 70,000 last year; this year began with nearly 20,000 spam comments in the first month!]
Congratulations!
Happy launch-day (“birthday” didn’t sound right).
Thanks Peter, thanks Adulcia – birthday sounds fine to me 😉
Congratulations from a fellow five year old. It was obviously a very good year for new bloggers 🙂
MadPriest, a fellow five year old – I didn’t know! Congratulations to you also! & thanks Rachel your site, too, is full of goodies.
Happy Birthday – thanks for all the good stuff here. 😀
¡Felicidades Padre Bosco!
Gracias, Hermano David!
Everyone I’ve ever shared this site with has said they found it informative, useful and encouraging.
I’m not surprised it’s so popular- thank you for writing it!
Thanks, Tracy, for your encouragement. You run a wonderful site also.
What a great success story here. I started a Christian blog recently and would be thriled to have just a small amount of the pageviews you have achieved. Great job brother!
Thanks, Josh. I had a look around your site, I’m particularly impressed with its layout. It is good to see you have a twitter profile. I suggest you also get a facebook page. Regular good additions to your site will encourage the visits. In a couple of days I will put up a graph of the growth of visitors here – I’m sure you are in it for the longer haul. Blessings.