First off, I’d just like to wish all you M*A*S*H fans reading this a happy new year. I’ve written up my second annual Year In Review, basically a summary of all things M*A*S*H related in 2003. We’ve got DVD releases, Alan Alda’s surgery, M*A*S*HBack, everything. Go take a look.
finest-kind.net has been operational for over a year now and I think it is time to clue everyone in on how well we’re doing in terms of viewers and all that. So, without further ado, FK stats for 2003:
An estimated 120,000 people visited Finest Kind this year, with nearly 225,000 page views, a whopping 925,000 hits, and over 9.5 gigabytes of bandwidth. This is impressive, to say the least. I never thought that so many people would come to my site when I started it back in 1999. And now…wow.
For those who are interested, the two most popular pages were The Series and Multimedia, with the opening theme being the most popular file, followed by the video clip from Period of Adjustment.
People were coming to Finest Kind from ezboards, Google searches, Yahoo searches, and the top keywords were “1”, “8”, “lynette mettey” and “coproral klinger”. Interesting. AOL.com was the most popular domain, and there were visitors from the United Kingdom, Canda, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Denmark, Singapore, Czech Republic, Sweden, Israel, Italy, Finaly, Austria, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, Romania, the list goes on and on. Again, this is overwhelming.
But of course, all good things must come to an end. That’s the announcement, I’m afraid. I started this site back on a freebie host sometime in 1999 (I really have no idea when). I’ve moved so many times I don’t have any recollection of the first URL, all I know is that I moved to Tripod and from Tripod I came to Finest-Kind.net. I plan on keeping the site online through August 2003 (seeing as I’ve already paid for it) but come October, that’s it.
I guess it has been hard to not notice the fact that I haven’t been updating much lately. There’s not that much going on with M*A*S*H and I just don’t have the time to keep it up the way I’d like to. Recently I also had some trouble with someone taking my work and not crediting me, surprising to say the least. I do get an awful lot of e-mail, but 75% is SPAM, so it really isn’t that much.
I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with the remaining time I’ve got. I don’t think Ill be updating that much, I may just leave it up until August ends “as is” for everyone to enjoy. I don’t know what I plan on doing with everything after that, I won’t be going back to a freebie site, I don’t feel like leaving it up if I’m not going to look after it. I may decide to adopt a sort of “free-for-all” policy and let anyone who wants something just go ahead and take it, giving me credit, of course. That would probably be the best way to keep all this work in the M*A*S*H community.
I’m sure this must come as a shock to some of you and for that I apologize. I’ve spent a good chunk of time on this site, days and days researching, watching and rewatching, writing, checking facts, making images, videos and sounds. It has been fun and M*A*S*H is always going to be a part of my life, no matter what happens with the site. I rewatched the entire fourth season over the course of the last three days, in fact.
Feel free to drop me an e-mail if you’ve got any suggestions.
