Buondì.
I was looking at visitor stats for the club website this morning, which got me thinking statistically.
I recently reached the ripe old age of fifty-two.
If memory serves correctly, (that’s a fairly big ‘if’) I registered the domain ‘OnlineItalianClub.com’ back in 2012, so seven years ago.
Since then, the calculator on my laptop informs me, I’ve spent thirteen point four six percent of my life on developing it.
I’ve written one thousand and seventy-four articles (like this one)
And written or edited one thousand four hundred and ninety-seven pages (articles and pages are different in WordPress…)
So far.
Plus, there are several hundred interactive exercises, most of which I know intimately because they have to be modified manually every few years.
Has it all been worth it?
There are over twelve-thousand club ‘members’, that is to say people who’ve joined the mailing list and so receive these articles three times a week.
Around three thousand of you will read this, some with enthusiasm, others less so.
Besides the emailed articles, the club website (I like to think of it as a ‘clubhouse’, where people can go hang out) gets around seven thousand five hundred ‘page views’ a day, fewer at weekends, more when something cool is going on.
That’s not earth shattering – think of a surburban McDonald’s rather than the one in Leicester Square (London’s Times Square, if you’ve never heard of it – pronounced ‘Lester’)
But over the years it will have added up to several million views by hundreds of thousands of different people from around the world.
And what have these multitudes been looking at, I ask?
Here are the top pages from the last seven days (thanks Google!)
- The A1 – Beginner/Elementary ‘level page’, showing everything we have for those of you who are just starting out
- A top-level page with links to the six levels and the level test
- The Grammar Exercises Index
- The Listening Exercises Index
- The home page
- Sixty dialogues – audio plus transcript
- The Vocabulary Index – probably the weakest section of the club, if you ask me
- Learn Italian With Free Online Italian Lessons: 01 Articles (But what a shame if people never get past lesson #01…)
- Italian Grammar Lessons: The Past / Passato Prossimo – Google likes this page, for some reason
- The A2 – Pre-Intermediate ‘level page’
- The B1 – Intermediate ‘level page’
- Our verb conjugator
- The level test (which is very old!)
- Italian Grammar Lessons: Definite and Indefinite articles
- ‘Agenda del giorno 1’, our most popular listening task
- The ‘Start Here’ page from the main menu. Some people clearly do
- Italian Levels: What’s my level in Italian?
- The B2 – Upper-Intermediate ‘level page’
Interesting, huh?
Well, I thought so, anyway.
What else?
I’ve no ebook to sell this week.
Easter’s coming and I’m sure you’ll have better things to do.
(Talking of which, see the poem in today’s P.S.)
I shouldn’t, though, skip the mandatory reminder to listen to Saturday’s EasyItalianNews.com bulletin, read by my wife, as the boy was off on a school trip.
A mercoledì, allora.
P.S.
I didn’t entirely waste my weekend, siesta-ing and drinking beer.
Below is one of the poems that resulted.
Hope you like it!
(But feedback is welcome either way…)
+++
The poem that was born and lived it’s first month in this space has now gone to live here: