We press on, invisible

The Foxearth and District Local History Website continues to enjoy more and more support. We now get consistently more than three hundred visits a day, (384 at the last count) and average 76527 hits a month. Of course we are not in the same league as the chatrooms and pornographic sites, but we flatter ourselves that we attract a better quality of reader.

Paradoxically, there is such a thing as having too many visits, at which point the ISP is likely to start charging more. Fortunately, our internet service provider, USP Networks, are active supporters and so are only charging a nominal amount, so we are in the happy position of encouraging more people to visit the site

The 'Hysterical Historian' began as an experiment in allowing more people to contribute to the site. Curiously, it has had the reverse effect. Although the number of visits has increased in a very satisfactory way since we started the column, almost nobody besides you is actually reading it. The BLog (Web Log) achieved around six visits a day, which I was rather pleased about until I realised that half of those visits were probably by me, checking the layout and spellings.

I am undaunted, as the discipline of having to do a column has made me go to parts of my library that were gathering dust, and has been a welcome relief from the routine of the hobby of Local History, such as the drudge of transcribing inventories. Our readers are a conservative lot, and our new publications generally lie unread on the site for months before suddenly becoming popular. We live in hope