I started this site several years ago, after visiting the Origins Game Fair in Columbus and wanting to do something to give back to the community. I thought it would be nice to collect and report on information from all the game manufacturers and retailers I knew of.

My original intent was for this to be a daily news site, with postings about every single game news item I could find. That proved to be too ambitious once I got married, had a home to maintain, and other responsibilities. I scaled back a bit and dropped my coverage of gaming areas I wasn’t personally too familiar with, like roleplaying. Then my mother became ill. She died of melanoma in 2008. Two weeks after her funeral, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. This site became the last thing on my mind. Things at work also heated up. The entire management chain above me was changed. My job responsibilities changed. There was a lot to learn, and again, this site became the last thing on my mind.

Now, I’m past the cancer. The job’s still pretty intense, and it probably will be for a while. Things are busy at home, too. So I’ve adjusted the site’s focus again. Daily gaming news is still much too ambitious. However, I’m planning to post at least twice a week during the “non-convention” weeks of my year. Each of these posts will be a sort of “headline news” update of what I found out in the gaming world since the last update. During the “convention” weeks (specifically Origins and Gen Con Indy, but there could be others someday), I’ll post much longer narratives, game reviews, and other items of interest.

With Origins coming up next week and Gen Con in a couple of months, I thought it might be good to look at Gamer Hotsheet’s visitor stats. After all, it might not be worth updating this site if no one out there is reading it… right?

Fortunately, it looks like you ARE reading it, for which I thank you. According to the server software, there have been 24,078 unique visitors since I brought the site online on this server. There were 1093 unique visitors in May 2010, and so far this month 935. Those (roughly) 1,000 unique visitors in May looked at a total of 10,000 pages (or about 10 pages each). Several hundred people seem to be subscribing to the RSS feeds, which is one of the reasons I switched to WordPress a while ago (my previous server software didn’t offer those).

This site’s busiest days so far were in September 2009 and early April 2010.

Here’s a breakdown of the visits by a variety of categories (since the site was brought to life on this server), as accumulated by the StatPress plug-in:

Operating System	Visits
Windows XP	65803
Windows Vista	41322
Windows 2000	10334
Linux	10022
Windows 98	6644
Windows NT 4	5870
Windows Server 2003	5735
Mac	4648
Mac OS X	3752
Windows 95	2566

Browser	Visits
Internet Explorer 6	50074
Internet Explorer 5	17814
Firefox 3	15553
Internet Explorer 7	10297
Thunderbird	7128
Internet Explorer 4	6496
“Generic Gecko”	5075
Firefox	4712
Opera	3453
Internet Explorer 8	3136

So, the breakdown of visitors to this site along operating system lines is about 88% Windows, 6% Linux, and 5% Macintosh. The variety of older Windows versions was surprising to me. I expected XP and Vista, being two of the more-current releases, to be high on the list. I didn’t expect to see Windows 95, 98, or even NT 4 on the list. Windows Server 2003 was also a surprise, though it could be that this is how Windows 7 is being reported.

Browser-wise, it was much the same. Internet Explorer clearly dominates the numbers, but Firefox makes a strong showing. It’s possible the “Generic Gecko” is Chrome and/or Safari.

The most-active domains referring people to this site (apart from search engines) are podfeed.net and longbowgames.com. I remember seeing Longbow’s Hegemony game a while ago and being very impressed by the demo. It appears the game is available from them now for $29.99. I may have to add that to my wish list…

Now that updates on the site are getting more regular, I’m hoping the traffic will increase along with it. If you enjoy what you’re seeing here on the site, here are a few of the things you can do to help (and to encourage me to keep doing it):

• If something posted on this site is relevant to a blog post you’re writing, a game forum discussion you’re taking part in, etc., feel free to link to this site. Quality links like those will help bring traffic here, which will make me happy and encourage me to keep running the site. (But please do not “spam” links into unrelated discussions or forum posts. Those don’t help.)
  
• Let your friends know about this site on Twitter, Facebook, etc., especially if they’re fellow gamers.
  
• The news items I post here come from an automated scan (followed by a manual review) of changes to about 400 game-related web sites. If you’re with a game publisher or game-related manufacturer and I’ve never mentioned you here, it’s likely I haven’t encountered your company before or have lost track of your web site. You can correct that by posting a comment on a relevant page here. Make sure to include a URL to your “news” page or somewhere on your site I can watch for information about what you’re up to. I’m brainstorming a good way to allow you to submit news items and emails without compromising my main email accounts with spam. (I used to have a specific email address for this site but took it offline due to cost and disuse.)
  
• Remember that this site is sponsored by advertisers. Letting them know you saw their product here when you make your purchase would let them know we’re helping them out.

That’s all for now. Time to do a check to see if I can find any interesting news for you…