On June 25th, 2002, just one year and four days after turning over one million hits, Webster celebrated its second millionth hit. The first million hits took just under a year and a half; the second million came nearly six months faster. Who says assembly language is falling out of favor with programmers? Well, on to three million!

June 21, 2001

On the first day of summer of the new millenium, Webster's "hit odometer" turned over a big milestone: 1,000,000 site hits. While this may not seem impressive to a web administrator at Disney, AltaVista, or even some commercial x86 related sites like x86.org, this is pretty good for a personal web site.

Webster actually had far more than 1,000,000 hits as of June 21, 2001. Webster has been up and running since 1996 when I first put "The Art of Assembly Language" on-line for my students at UC Riverside. My decision to begin counting site hits actually predated Jan 1, 2000, but the system administrators at UCR killed the old page counter at one point in 1999 so I decided to wait until the "calendar odometer" turned over for Y2K before placing the new counter on Webster.

When I reset the counter to zero on Jan 1, 2000, Webster was averaging about 1,000 hits a day. As I write this in the middle of 2001, Webster's averaging between 2,500 and 3,000 hits a day. The daily average over the past 18 months has been about 1,800 hits per day. The pace is still accelerating (though it varies by season with the summer months being the slowest period since school is out).

At some point late in the year 2000, the UCR system administrators changed the behavior of the hit counter that Webster uses (all the web pages on the UCR CS Department's servers share the same counter). Apparently, some students were sitting around constantly hitting the refresh button on their browser to bump up the hit counter and this annoyed the system administrators. The new hit counter, as best I can tell, only increments when it gets a hit from a different source than the last hit. So if you sit and press refresh on the page counter, the odometer won't increment unless someone else hit the site since your last access (I don't know for sure that this is the behavior, but it appears to work this way). One drawback to this scheme is that users accessing Webster from a Macintosh seem to have some bizarre effects on the hit counter (it doesn't increment and often doesn't display well). The bottom line is that Webster's hit counter isn't entirely accurate; it undercounts hits and overcounts visits. Nevertheless, it is the only on-site metric available for measuring Webster's popularity and seems to do an okay job (i.e., the numbers aren't overinflated).

Webster's popularity is primarily due to three things.

• Content,
• Tons of links from other sites (due, primarily to point one), and
• Favorable status on many search engines on the net (due to points one and two).

I would like to personally thank all those who've listed Webster on their "links" page. You are responsible for boosting Webster's popularity to its current level.

Of course, I would certainly like to thank those who've visited Webster; you are the ones who've made Webster the site that it is today.

Webster didn't achieve this modicum of popularity by being static. Indeed, most visitors to Webster are repeat visitors because Webster is constantly evolving. Now that Webster has achieved the 1,000,000 hit milestone, it's time to start working towards 2,000,000 and beyond! You can expect to see lots of new information appearing on Webster in the months and years to come; so keep visiting!

Randy Hyde

June 21, 2001