On this day, according to Wikipedia:

• 1346 – King David II of Scotland led an invasion of England during the Hundred Years’ War, but was captured in the Battle of Neville’s Cross.
• 1604 – Kepler’s Star: German astronomer Johannes Kepler observed an exceptionally bright star which had suddenly appeared in the constellation Ophiuchus.
• 1662 – King Charles II of England sold Dunkirk to France for £40,000.
• 1860 – The Open Championship, the oldest of the four major championships in men’s golf, was first played at Prestwick Golf Club in Prestwick, South Ayrshire, Scotland.
• 1977 – German Autumn: Four days after it was hijacked, Lufthansa Flight 181 landed in Mogadishu, Somalia, where a team of German GSG 9 commandos rescued all remaining hostages on board.

Interesting, but forget about all that. No, what’s really important is that Angry Chinese Driver celebrates its ONE MONTH ANNIVERSARY TODAY!!!

Yep, at two o’ clock in the morning on Monday, September 17, 2007, I decided to create an account with WordPress. And thus, the creation of Angry Chinese Driver, a site that is at times random, humourous (hopefully!), offensive, and arrogant. And of course, angry. Since its inception, there have been some pretty cool and unexpected happenings.

For one, I began a trend (within this site) of having an image with every article, and especially mouse-drawing my Driving articles on MS Paint (gotta love it). I did it for my first real post about an idiot cyclist who almost ended up like the squashed bugs on my front bumper, and found out that it’s something creative and original but easy to do.

Then exactly ten days after the start of Angry Chinese Driver, a gracious soul referred me on StumbleUpon, giving me 462 hits; combined with some Facebook spamming (hehe), I ended up with a mind-blowing 731 hits by midnight. I didn’t see it coming, and I haven’t seen anything like it since (though I’m hoping for this site to increase substantially from just 80-100 hits a day! ). A few days before the 27th, I was creeping along with 10 or so hits a day.

And just a day earlier than the highest-traffic-count day to this site, I had made a post about Porsche lowering car prices in Canada to reflect our stronger-than-ever dollar; it ended up getting 53 hits that day, the highest single-day hit count for all my posts so far.

All was okay until 10 days later, when I started getting massive spikes in traffic from searches about the possible-and-non-existent demise of Facebook; over the course of three days, I got five to 17 to 49 hits to that article, and it stayed just as high afterwards. It quickly overcame the Porsche article as the most viewed post (and Porsche had a very strong lead, too), and as of now it’s close to 300 hits (while the Porsche article is still stuck well below the 200 mark). Another quite-unexpected pleasant surprise!

So after discovering that people were finding this site by Googling “facebook being shut down” and variations of those keywords, I wrote an article about it, a nice follow-up. Traffic to it was slow for a while, until about last week when it really picked up, and hits-per-day have been gradually increasing ever since. With almost 150 hits so far, it’ll soon kick the Porsche article out of second place for most total hits of all the posts. And then Angry Chinese Driver, despite the name, will be contributing to the world of “blogs” (I hate that word) with its articles lamenting at how gullible and inane people are when they get all worked up thinking that Facebook will shut down and destroy their lives.

And that’s basically notable events of Angry Chinese Driver in the last month in a nutshell. More than 2,250 hits and going strong. I can’t wait to see what Month #2 has in store for me!