Dali House

“The Evening News”, 1880s, by Louis Charles Moeller (1855-1930)

I’m pleased to note that Dali House, which is admittedly sometimes a millstone around my neck, reached a milestone on Wednesday: 100,000 visitors in the past 11 months. That’s “visits” as opposed to “page views”, which crossed the 150,000 mark a little while ago.

Those numbers go back to June 2008, when I installed the Sitemeter tracker, but of course Dali House had already been running for two and a half years by then. The first post was on January 5, 2006.

Seventeen days later I attempted to justify the blog’s existence with a post titled “Why a house for Dali?”, opening with a quote from Uncle Salvador: “There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.”

For me, Wednesday was one of those days. I had no idea when I decided to display a few optical illusions online that Google would one day be leading people here from 144 different countries, from Mali and South Korea and Senegal and Burma and Egypt and Latvia and Azerbaijan and Peru and Mauritius and Palestine.

There have been nearly 600 posts since the first one, along with hundreds of comments, dozens of incoming links, many compliments and thankyous, several questions I couldn’t come close to answering, and a few nasty remarks too.

I have more arthritis than arithmetic, but I know enough math to realise you can’t extrapolate on the Sitemeter figures by merely averaging out the 11 months’ visits and multiplying by 30 months (273,000), because hardly anyone was visiting Dali House in its first year.

So Dali House is just going to rest on the official laurels, and thank everyone very, very much.