I reset the map at the bottom of our pages

[Betty]

I reset & cleared the map of all dots at the bottom of our pages. It had been so cluttered with visitor dots after a half a year, it barely looked much different month to month anymore.

So it's been restarted fresh today. It'll be fun to watch the dots slowly grow again. It might be a different pattern this time as we have different filters to block out odd bots, malicious IPs, some other nasty stuff, & dual firewalls. I've also took steps to reduce traffic this year to save costs, work, & time. So the dots should accumulate a little slower this time.

[Betty]

It's amazing how many dots accumulated in just one weekday! Although we have our super users who visit every day or 2, Most of our regular users only visit once or twice a week, or just a couple times a month. Many wait till a day or night off, so we're the busiest around weekends.

Check it out at the bottom of our pages.

The map doesn't load when you visit to save on bandwidth & load times. It only loads when you actually scroll down to it, so if you don't see it, or you get a blank section when you get there, just wait a few seconds for it to load.

I deliberately took steps to reduce traffic by 1/3 to half back in February to save costs, work, & my time. So we're not getting the traffic like we used to in previous years. Yesterday we had 12,079 hits to Betty's from 2,608 different users... a little busier than recent average Wednesdays. I was trying to keep traffic under 10,000 hits a day. Up until February we were averaging 15,000-18,000 hits a day from around 5,000-6,000 different daily users, with peak days of around 20,000 hits a day. That was unsustainable unless I invested more time, work, & money. As I promised, with lack of enough donations, I cut back Betty's.

The good news is, most of our regular & normal visitors didn't notice any difference, & things seem quite normal. Cutbacks hardly affected them. You will notice I put out less galleries, special features, multimedia, & movies now though. They drive up traffic, & attract newer or younger users. Not so good if I'm constantly having to increase our capacity because of increasing traffic. It costs more money & work to increase capacity & handle more traffic.

I've also stopped doing what Google, Alexa, & Amazon want me to do to maintain a high ranking. High rankings drive more traffic here. I no longer bend over backwards to please the ranking gods.