Allow me to perform a little bit of self-evaluation:
I started posting my optimized Firefox builds on November 6th. The response and traffic have been pretty incredible, at least by this rather unassuming web site’s standards:
Since November 6th:
- The first builds were hosted on an unused 1and1 account, which had a monthly bandwidth allotment of 25 gigabytes. That was gone within 36 hours.
- I then moved the builds to my dotMac iDisk, and to Apple’s credit they’ve been up ever since. One of my clients (Cocoatech) let me mirror builds on their server, which helped alleviate the bandwidth crunch.
- Over 30,000 downloads in ten days, which is a low estimate as iDisk doesn’t offer stats, so I’m judging this 100% on exit linkage in my domain stats.
- I’m sitting at around 65,000 visits since I started posting builds, with the lion’s share of traffic (over 55,000) going to the build’s entry URL. To give you some context, I normally get around 15,000 unique visits in a month.
- No Slashdot (thank god), though I was kind of half-expecting it, seeing how this managed to make nearly all of the major mac sites.
The top referring domains? In order:
- Mac OS X Hints
- Google (based on terms searched on before arriving here)
- Hicksdesign - which shows you just how popular Jon’s site has become (and deservedly so).
- Macintouch, and
- Wired magazine’s weblog
The only other post that even came close to attracting this much attention in the past was either the importing Gmail contacts post, or the Mac OS X software inventory post. And the latter was mainly due to the mighty Merlin Mann doing the Mac nerd linkup.
All in all, pretty neat, especially considering I thought there wouldn’t be a lot of interest in a build optimized for such a new processor as Apple’s G5.
Okay, enough self-examination. Back to listening to the new Stars album and some yummy ginger tea.
