Netscape Meteors: Retrospective

Last week, I published a small blog post about trying to find the original Netscape “meteors” loading animation. At some point that night, someone posted it on the orange website, and … it did some numbers.

As of today, five days later, my server has registered just over 200,000 page accesses.

% grep "GET /blog/2023/08/netscape-meteors/" \
    /var/log/nginx/access.log | wc -l
  200201

Bandwidth saw a bit of a spike too.

To my knowledge this is the first time anything I’ve published on the internet has been picked up by Hacker News. It’s jarring to realize so many people have visited my website in the last several days, reading this and other things I’ve written, listening to music I’ve published, and looking through photos I’ve posted. It’s a little like having surprise house guests and realizing you haven’t tidied up in a little while.

I only took a brief look at the comments. I was pleased to see they were civil, and mostly reminiscing about the days of Netscape and the early web. I had a few people reach out to tell me they enjoyed my post too.

Thanks, y’all, for reading my little corner of the web, and for your kind words.