It has been slightly over a year now since I started publishing new articles each week at Artima.com. That began on July 8, 2002, with the first installment of the interview with Bob Scheifler. In July 2002, Artima.com received 403,000 page views. The traffic has more than doubled in the past year. In July 2003, Artima.com received over one million page views, over two million file requests, and over three million hits. All those requests were made by approximately 188,000 unique users, 50,000 more people than live in Sunnyvale, California, my home town. This really blows my mind as I roam around my home town and look at how many people live here. 188,000 people is a lot of people.

I would like to apologize for the occasional reliability problems some of you may have experienced here. It is a scalability problem, and I'm working on it. It is actually a fun and interesting problem to work on, but unfortunately I myself am also having trouble scaling. I just have too many things to do right now, and not enough hands to do it, so many important things get pushed to the next day. So I appreciate your patience as I work my way through this awkward growth phase.

Mostly, though, I would like to say thanks to everyone who has come to Artima.com to blog, to buzz, to discuss, or just to read. I really do enjoy bringing everyone together and am very happy with the signal to noise ratio so far. The quality of posts has been very high in the weblogs and forums. I am quite worried that as the traffic grows further, the signal to noise ratio will gradually diminish, as I've seen happen at other sites. If anyone has ideas as to how to keep the signal to noise ratio high, please post them in the forum for this weblog entry.