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Serving up the hints for 5% of a century...
Authored by: robg on Nov 04, '05 07:23:58AM
Yea, and we just recently passed 100,000,000 database hits on the stats page. Database hits are cheap and easy, I know, but it's still been fun to see it climb over time.

Here are a few more stats that aren't on that page...
  • If you assume 250 working days a year, then we've averaged 6.39 hints per day, every day, for five years.
  • There are 11,269,162 total characters in those hints. Assuming five characters per word, that's 2,253,832 words over five years -- words that I kept. If you assume a fair bit of rewriting before saving a hint, it's probably at least 3,000,000 words total over that time.
  • 3,000,000 word total means 600,000 words per year. Break that down into 250 working days, and it's about 2,400 words a day. To put that in comparison, a typical two-page spread in Macworld is about 1,200 words. My hands hurt just thinking about it.
  • We're approaching 60,000 registered (free account) users, at 60 months online. That's a pretty constant average of 1,000 new registrants per month.
  • With the exception of five or so days in 2002, I have personally edited every hint published here. That week was the only true vacation I've taken from the site, and I had a friend serve in the editor's role for me. I've taken other vacations since then, but they've always involved posting the hints each day. Even when our daughter was born, the hints kept flowing -- waking up very early each day makes this possible. Just a heads-up, though, that I do intend to take some vacation time away from hints during the next year or so!
Though the above may sound negative in some ways, it's not meant to -- I love what I do, otherwise I would have stopped doing it long ago!

-rob.

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Serving up the hints for 5% of a century...
Authored by: kwielandinstl on Nov 04, '05 08:28:52AM

Way to go!

Keep up the good work, this site is really a valuable tool.



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Serving up the hints for 5% of a century...
Authored by: benfsmith on Nov 04, '05 09:33:20AM

I would be interested to learn more about the typical poster and commenter. What are the average and highest number of hints posted by the posters and comments by the commenters?



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Serving up the hints for 5% of a century...
Authored by: robg on Nov 04, '05 03:20:29PM

I'll see what I can figure out ... could be interesting!

-rob.



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