 This site was first published in August 1997, after my final exams at the
University left me some time. I first thought that this site would be used mainly by
people who knew me beforehand, and by a few strangers who would stumble on it by chance.
The total opposite happened : the friends to whom I gave the site's address paid a polite
visit if at all, but as soon as I began my advertising campaign in the newsgroups and the
search engines, a flood of strangers began to visit my site. Some come by error and go
away in the next click, but most people seem to stay on the part of the site they arrived
in, and then move to other parts. A guy at the NASA even spent more than a full hour
reading everything on my site ! As you can see below I got visitors from most part of the
internet-developed world, with a pseudo concentration on the US because of the log files
analysis software affectation of all the .com, .org and .net computers to this country. Flying the Desert was intended to be an
as-interesting-as-can-be account of my flight, to encourage non-american pilots to go and
fly in the US. Again, the opposite happened : most of the readers of this site come from
the US, mainly from the regions I overflew. I get every week emails from nice people who
thank me for sharing this flight with them, which I always appreciate. I wish I'd receive more critic email that could help me improve this site. The volume of visitors varies wildly with the newsgroups submitting that I make, the dead tree newspaper articles that are published, but it almost never dropped below 200 page views per day. |