Happy 30,000!

At 6:33:58 this morning, as I was just getting out of bed and into the shower, someone in the Central Time Zone became the 30,000th visitor to Water Dissolves Water. Using their Firefox browser and their Windows XP operating system, they Googled up this picture of Jesus from my March 20th Palm Sunday post. As the image filled their insanely large 1600 x 1200 pixel monitor (they must like small icons), I wonder if the text was what the picture had led them to believe? I hope that I hadn't offended, although I don't mind if I had challenged them a little.

A few minutes earlier, a visitor from Belgium was the 29,999th visitor, and a few minutes later, an AOLer from Germany was the 30,001.

It was only last month that I got my 20,000th visitor, an East Coaster surfing for pictures of David Bowie, and last March that this blog hit the 10,000-visit level. So, to recap the history of Water Dissolves Water, the blog started in May 2004 and nobody read it all that year. In early 2005, I started getting some hits, reaching the 10,000 visit mark in June. But then readership fell off for a month or two, only to pick back up, and now I'm getting over 200 hits a day, and 10,000 in just a little over a month.
But who are these people, and why do they come here? The largest number of hits are still coming from Google image searches for Jimi Hendrix pictures, followed by Courtney Love. Next comes Google image searches for the painting "Private Dancer" by Jack Vettriano, and interestingly, next a picture of the Virgin Mary holding a t-rex. Those are my top 5 referrals, and all come from the U.S. These are followed by British Google searches for the Vettriano painting, then American searches for a sick Valentine's Day pic that I posted called "I Love You to Death," then The Creation of Adam, and Edith Vonnegut's Goddess. Next it's the Canadians looking for the Hendrix pics, then the Brits, then the Germans, French and Aussies, and so on.

So my strategy earlier this year to increase traffic by posting gratuitous pictures of Jimi Hendrix seems to have payed off. Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Anyway, happy 30 thousand. See you at 50!