The 20,000th visitor to UrbanGrounds hit at 09:18 a.m (Central European Time) from somewhere in the UK. How’d they find my site? By Googling (in Italian) for “Dominique Green”—a former Texas Death Row inmate, whose execution I wrote about on October 26th, 2004.

A Brief History of UrbanGrounds

On July 22, 2003 I started UrbanGrounds as a journal to track my training and racing in the Texas Water Safari marathon canoe race. I was hand-coding my HTML pages, and was not using a blogging site or tool to manage my content.

Late last year, I discovered my first real daily blog—Jason’s The Horrors of an Easily Distracted Mind—I knew right away that I wanted to start blogging, rather than journaling.

So on Sept. 22, 2004, I installed WordPress 1.2, had my wife help me with a quick redesign of the famous Kubrik theme, and UrbanGrounds — The Blog was born.

I moved over a few pieces from my journal, but the first official post to UrbanGrounds was on September 22, 2004 — a review of the 2004 Austin City Limits Music Festival.

The first comment on UrbanGrounds was from a close friend, Richie Fatheree—one of Austin’s most famous Liberals (amongst Austinites with only one testical who also front a punk band)—who wrote to give me grief about this post. Since then, 972 other comments have been left on 255 posts.

It has taken almost exactly 9 months to hit my first 20K visitors. However, I didn’t have a site meter on every page in my site (just the home page, and thus was missing a lot of uncounted hits to my site). Once I added a site meter to every page, my daily unique visitors jumped from an average of about 38/day to 318/day.

At my current level of traffic, I anticipate hitting my next 20K visitors in about 66 days. I know that’s nothing compared to the 115,338 daily visits to top blogs like the Instapundit…but it’s a start, and I’m damn proud of it.

Thanks to all who have stopped in, and especially to those of you who come back often. To Preston, Dianne, Trevor, and Debra…a special thanks for contributing so often and so thoughtfully (and at times energetically) in the comments section. You all help to keep things interesting and moving in new directions.

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UPDATED on Aug 19, 2005: While it took nearly 9 months to log my first 20K visitors, it took me just 1 day short of 2 months to reach my next 20K…at 10:15 a.m., my 40,oooth visitor was registered).