So Where are We Now?

posted on may 6, 2003, tag: site

I started this website on December 1, 2000. Well, officially, at least. Before buying the domain maniacalrage.net (and, subsequently, maniacalrage.com), this site was hosted on a subdomain of another website I ran at the time. Also, before becoming ManiacalRage, the site was called Garrett.Online.Org, a name which I'm glad didn't survive. Back then the site was just an about me section and a journal (which I hard-coded in HTML for each entry).

In October of 2000 I began to learn PHP and MySQL. This would forever change things. I purchased the domain and began to write the site from the ground up in PHP. As I learned, I constantly wrote and rewrote the site's back-end, bettering it and adding new features. In the past three years I have written two versions of my own CMS, used one a friend wrote, and now I'm using Movable Type.

As of this writing, there are 132 entries, starting in May of 2002. Before that month, there were roughly 150 other entries which were removed permanently on December 1, 2002. Those entries were old and of a different frame of mind. I tossed them and I've never looked back. There are also currently 416 comments, which means each entry receives an average of 3 comments. Well, that's not entirely true, since most old entries have 1 comment and newer entries tend to average 6 or 7. Either way, reader feedback is much higher than it used to be and that's something I'm really happy with.

There have been eleven visual version of this site (roughly). The current design has been in place since January 12, 2003. Elements of this design, especially the graphical dates, got widespread praise and caused quite a link-trail. I was linked on What Do I Know. Who knew people would like the tutorial so much?

In July of 2002 I wrote and released my Winamp2 plugin, CurrentlyHearing. CH is a simple plugin that allows you to show what you're "currently hearing" in Winamp on your website. Version 2.0 was released on December 21, 2002. To date, there have been over 4,000 downloads of CH. Many people use CH every day on their website.

The average number of unique visits a day to Rage in June of 2002 was 43. Last month, April of 2003, the average was 253. In less than a year, the average has increased nearly 6 times over. Monthly totals are as currently as high as 7,700 unique visits a month, a number which astounds me. I went from 5 unique people reading my website total to this in less than three years. There's something nice about that.

And I'm not done yet. I've felt a resurgence of this place in the last 8 months. I'm enjoying this more than I ever have. I hope you'll stick around to see what happens next.

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