10,000 monthly visitors, apparently

I created davetang.org on the 24th of April 2009 just for the sake of buying a domain with my name in it. Realising that I was and am paying for a service, I decided to actually make use of my web space. But it really started to become handy when I decided to pursue a PhD in April 2010; initially I just dumped everything I was learning onto my wiki and this blog. 4 years after creating davetang.org, I'm getting ~10,000 unique visitors to my domain each month according to AWStats, which my web hosting company has conveniently provided.

The dip around April, May and June in 2012 was due to the removal of AWStats by my web host. I guess enough people complained, so they brought it back. And if this trend continues, I will need to pay for more bandwidth.

I'm guessing the increase in visitors each month is due to the growing interest in RNA sequencing. Using Google Trends (formerly known as Google insight), we observe the growing web interest into the term RNA-Seq:

Of course I am doing a much better job (in my opinion) of writing better and more useful posts. To celebrate, I changed the header image to a photo I took while playing around with long exposure times. I took the photo near the Tokyo station in Japan; it looks cool so I thought I'll make it the header. I also changed the background to black because it's easier on the eyes.