Noticed my home page counter hit 1500 visits this morning

I put a little visitor counter on my Geocities page back in 1998 just for fun. Forgot about it completely until I checked the site yesterday. It rolled over to 1,500 sometime in the last week. I have no idea who these people are or why they're clicking through my page about skateboarding tips and pixel art. Feels weird to think 1,500 strangers have looked at something I built in my bedroom after school. Has anyone else been surprised by a old counter number on a site you forgot existed?

2 comments

2 Comments

hollym1210d ago

Actually I was reading an article the other day about how old web counters are making a small comeback with people who miss the early internet. 1500 is actually pretty impressive for a Geocities page since most of those old counters were inflated by bots crawling the web back then. My own Angelfire page from 1999 only has 723 hits and I'm pretty sure half of those were me refreshing it hoping someone commented in the guestbook. Did you have a guestbook on yours too or just the counter?

skyler_craig10d ago

My Geocities page had both the counter AND a guestbook, but the guestbook was basically a ghost town - got maybe 10 real messages out of 800 signings, and the rest were just bots or people posting links to their own pages. The counter felt like the only real proof anyone ever visited, even if I knew half those hits were probably web crawlers indexing the site for Yahoo. Looking back it was kind of sad how much I checked that number, but it kept me designing new layouts and adding stupid GIFs just in case someone actually saw them.