JUST BACKDATED - Statistical Milestone Reached!

Today is a momentous day in the life of Just Backdated because sometime in the last 24 hours someone somewhere in the world – and I know not who or where – became the 100,000^th person to read something that I had posted. This is not to say that 100,000 individuals have visited the blog of course, just that all the posts combined have now been read 100,000 times or, to put it another way, I’ve had 100,000 views or hits.

         I can be fairly certain, however, that at least 13,911 people from all around the world have visited Just Backdated because this is the number of hits recorded against the post that has attracted the highest number, the picture of Keith Moon with John and Paul from Santa Monica in 1974. I base this judgement on the assumption that no one will read the same post twice. It could, of course, be more than 13,911 because some visitors might have read something else and not read this particular post.

         Much of this traffic can be attributed to The Who, and their webmaster Richard Evans who took over the role earlier this year following the sad and unexpected death of the previous incumbent, our friend Rob Lee. Richard, who for many years now has been The Who’s Art Director, and I go back a long way and he’s been alerting Who fans to Who-related posts via the group’s own Facebook page and website. Every time he does this I get a massive spike and, were it not for this, I doubt Just Backdated would have registered anywhere near as many hits as it has. Indeed, the top ten most visited posts are all Who related, with my story about Pete and Roger recently playing Ronnie Scott’s, when they announced this year’s UK tour, coming in second with 5,031 hits as of this morning. But what tipped the scales in the last two or three days was the post about Lowell George and Little Feat which has quickly become the only other item after all the Who posts to register over 1,000 hits, again because someone linked it to a Lowell George fan page.

         By far the most hits have come from the US with 44,619 followed by the UK with 24,643. Thereafter there’s a big gap with Canada in third place (3,831), followed by Japan (3,344), Germany (2,493) and Australia (2,054). Oddly, I’ve just had 85 hits from Turkey in the last 48 hours – maybe there’s a thriving Little Feat community there that no one knows much about. Either that or a bunch of LF fans are holidaying in Turkey right now.
        When I launched Just Backdated at the beginning on January this year I thought maybe I’d get a few hundred visits a month, so it’s exceeded my expectations by a country mile. So thanks for visiting and I’ll try to keep posting, though I have a feeling I might not be able to maintain the almost one-post-a-day pace for much longer.

CC, July 16, 2014.