Summary
In the month of July, Artima.com for the first time served over one million pages. I want to thank the approximately 188,000 people who visited last month.

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.

Lastly, I would like to take this opportunity to ask what kinds of articles people would like to see here at Artima.com in the future. What's your wish list?

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About the Blogger

Bill Venners is president of Artima, Inc., publisher of Artima Developer (www.artima.com). He is author of the book, Inside the Java Virtual Machine, a programmer-oriented survey of the Java platform's architecture and internals. His popular columns in JavaWorld magazine covered Java internals, object-oriented design, and Jini. Active in the Jini Community since its inception, Bill led the Jini Community's ServiceUI project, whose ServiceUI API became the de facto standard way to associate user interfaces to Jini services. Bill is also the lead developer and designer of ScalaTest, an open source testing tool for Scala and Java developers, and coauthor with Martin Odersky and Lex Spoon of the book, Programming in Scala.