Mount Washington Featured in February National Geographic

[Steve M]

Kathy,

Most of my friends know I am off my rocker. But anyway - the article and exposure is fantastic. What has the normal web traffic of visitors or pages viewed been over the recent past? It will be interesting to see what the change is when the magazines hit the homes.

I waited patiently (for me) and went to bed last night. Saw it first on Facebook this morning and now here. This is an excellent opportunity to get the word out about the mountain we love and the Observatory's good work.

Scot, excellent timing with the cold blast coming through the northeast.

It would be cool to see the web traffic to the site graphed over time. Both the MWO site and the forums site. I'm sure we would see spikes around certain events such as the Nin, Marty transition and when the weather channel was there.
Would it be fairly easy to do or take up too much time to be practical?

[Brad]

I found the photos. There is now a link on the left for Photo Gallery.

The image of the gallery at night is absolutely stunning! I need to have that as my laptop wallpaper.

The last picture is so funny! Bare legs stretched out in the sun - probably in Tuckermans - on the snow.

[Brad]

I normally get 400-500 images viewed to my Fotki photo site in a day. But, when it was mentioned one day in the Observers' Comments it spiked to over 35,000 in one day. The reverse will happen for the MWO site. We should see a large increase in traffic.

[BlueDog]

The last picture is so funny! Bare legs stretched out in the sun - probably in Tuckermans - on the snow.

I had to go back and check since I didn't remember a pic with bare legs... the last 3 or 4 pics weren't there earlier when I posted the link. Wonder if they'll keep adding more.

[fifteendays]

It would be cool to see the web traffic to the site graphed over time. Both the MWO site and the forums site. I'm sure we would see spikes around certain events such as the Nin, Marty transition and when the weather channel was there.
Would it be fairly easy to do or take up too much time to be practical?

When things slow down a bit I'll throw some numbers out to you. I'm a stat junkie, so I try to stay on top of what the site's been doing. According to one type of webstats analysis software, we had an 80,000 session (unique visit) day a couple of weeks ago. Google Analytics is a little different, and we've been around 45k individual unique visitors per month according to that software.

Trust me, I'll be burning some hours at home in Google Analytics as the magazine hits newsstands and things start really cranking up.

I just glanced at webstats for yesterday-- 82,550 unique visits and just shy of 130,000 page views. That may just be our biggest day ever, on the day BEFORE the article was released. Thank you, cold snap!

More on this in the coming weeks.

Scot
MWO Staff

[Brad]

Scot, you could not have asked for better timing for the article! I am checking every few hours to make sure the archive process for the web camera images keeps on running. The Conditions page over these few days will be interesting to follow afterwards.

[RI Swamp Yankee]

.... and on newsstands on January 27. .....

aaaagggggg...... I can't wait that long.

[mtruman]

I had to go back and check since I didn't remember a pic with bare legs... the last 3 or 4 pics weren't there earlier when I posted the link. Wonder if they'll keep adding more.

I also noticed on the second time through that a number of the observers (both current and past) are named in the photo captions but these references unfortunately didn't make it into the article. Hopefully some of them are still on captions on the photos in the magazine...

[bclark]

Somehow, after leaving as a permanent staff member a year and a half ago, "Hollywood" Jim Salge was still able to make it into the online version through a caption of one of the photos:

"'It's only a little over 6,000 feet,' says former observatory staffer Jim Salge, 'but people misjudge this place all the time.'"

Your legacy lives on Jim, haha.

[Brad]

Oh, Hollywood.