We're one year old! As promised, here's a few interesting tidbits and some highlights from the year... read on!

Some fun stats

- There are 156 published articles and 228 registered users.

- The traffic has been increasing steadily every month, January 2007 hit a new record with 1636 unique visitors so far!

- The majority of all visitors are referred from Google, this month there were 1334 Google searches that referred people to durbanscouts.za.net.

- The biggest search phrase this month was "Luca Santoniccolo", with 74 searches. Google ranks our page as #1 on the results.

- Other big ones were "blood diamond accent", "boogies diner", "metrobeat" and "taco zulu".

- There are some bizarre ones too: "durban rent boys", "why do i believe in god" and "indian girl getting fucked by italian"! How they ended up here...?

- We get extremely high rank on most searches, so if an article appears on our site, it normally makes the top results on Google.

- This also tells me that there aren't many people in Durban that search the internet for our type of content, otherwise it would be reflected in the stats. But don't worry, with the roll-out of cheap broadband from Ethekwini and Neotel, this should improve drastically by 2008 as we catch up with the rest of the world!

The highlights for me were...

Article on Battle Vir Woodstock, which caused a bit of animosity, especially from the chick I was complaining about (BaldChick). She later emailed to inform me that the only reason I bitched about her is because I was a racist, and that I was just upset because there was a black chick in rock 'n roll... hmm, notice how I never mentioned race or anything about race in the article... can anyone spot a chip on the 'ol shoulder? She also wrote "you're not the first person to say these things about me"... spot the pattern there, darling?

A review of the Metrobeat magazine, which revealed the Mayor's column was in fact plagiarised. It got a number of responses including one from the Metrobeat editor, who apologised and agreed to publish some more realistic information on crime!

The many articles and comments that were submitted by all our members... thanks for the great response, it's been a pleasure reading all the interesting opinions!

Some trivia...

- I picked the name "Durban Scouts" based on a nickname given to me by some friends while working the bar at Johnny Fox's pub in Florida Road. They called me "the scoutmaster", apparently because I was always prepared?!

- Anyway, the name of this site has nothing to do with the Boy Scouts, but rather a scout in the old sense of the word: sent out ahead of the pack to assess what's going on in the near future, finding the best options and scouting out the landscape.

- When the number of "Visitors online" shoots up, that's because a search engine spider is making an index of the site! It's not really 200 people all visiting at once.

This year, I want to upgrade the site to the latest version of the code, which could mean a change in theme. Please add some suggestions! What would you like to see here? New features? Better logo? Wherever possible we'll try sort it out! Thanks again everyone.