1000th visitor

According to Sitemeter I've just had the thousandth visitor to my site. Not bad from a starting count on January 26th this year.

Most of my traffic comes in from search engines and about nil from other blogs (with the possible exception of David Wang's very interesting IIS blog).

I get a lot of people who are clearly trying to sort out technical problems and somehow I have ended up in the top ten at Google, often number one, without really trying. I do notice however that Google takes a few days to index something (not a problem) and then, after a couple of months, it seems to throw the page away. For example, I was getting a lot of people coming to read about using C++ exceptions for handling COM errors, but now that's pretty much nobody as the article no longer appears prominently on Google. I'd like to think that this isn't because the information is useless (in fact I could see some people coming back to it and even saving it on their hard disks), but I can't see myself bothering with any of the SEO stuff just to get better rankings.

Another type of visitor I see a lot is people doing vanity searches. There are an awful lot of Kirits (mostly in India) and I feature prominently on these searches due to my domain name.

The last, but certainly not least, group is friends (and friends of friends) who come here. For those of you still reading remind me to buy you a beer when I next see you—and in fact anybody who I actually meet who reads this site should ask for a beer.

So, I'm going to start a sweepstake—when will Sitemeter show my 2,000th visitor? Post a reply to the thread in the forums and if you win I'll send you something.