About this Website

I first developed this website as a simple homepage on my ISP in Ireland in December 1998 and transferred it to my own domain www.frtommylane.com in September 1999. Since that time it has continued to grow and expand. When you visit my website you are viewing these pages on a server where I rent space from a website hosting company. As my website grew, and the number of visitors also grew requiring increased bandwidth, I transferred the site to whichever hosting company offered the best value for money for the size of the site and the services I required. The website is hosted on data servers in the USA.
I consider myself fortunate in that from the beginning I learned the html computer code from a college student in Ireland who taught me, rather than using software such as Dreamweaver. Initially then I wrote the first pages entirely using html code. Having mastered this, I began to use Microsoft FrontPage as my html editor since it contained the ability to format a page border and apply that to all pages in the site, thus reducing time and work. Microsoft discontinued FrontPage and gradually webhosting companies discontinued to support sites built using Microsoft FrontPage so I had to choose a new html editor. For my current needs the free version of Microsoft Expression Web is sufficient. Still my background knowledge of html allows me to sometimes solve problems with page encoding now that otherwise I would be unable to do. In the early years constructing my site, I joined a listserve for webmasters.

The next challenge I faced trying to keep my site current was the growing number of visitors using mobile platforms such as smartphones to view the site. The site was originally optimized for display on a computer monitor and when the number of visitors from mobile platforms reached 50% in 2013, I studied the latest revisions of html code (html5) in the fall of 2013, in order to do a complete redesign of my website. I found a template designed by a software company that was as close as possible to the design and structure of this website and commissioned the software company to rewrite that template in html5, i.e. responsive and dynamic so that it would serve the content of each page appropriately optimized for visitors whether using a smartphone vertically or horizontally, a tablet vertically or horizontally, or a PC. Thus each page can be served five different ways depending on the visitor’s device. Web design had advanced to the degree that my knowledge of the new responsive and dynamic html code was not adequate to allow me to do this sort of coding myself and the only option was to use that professional service. I imported each page of my site into the new template making necessary adaptations in each page to suit the new code and I put my newly designed website online for the first Sunday of Advent at the end of November 2013.

From time to time I check the statistics for visitors to this site. October 2014-September 2015, show that the site received an average of 2064 visitors each day generating an average of 42,255 hits each day, and 15,391,069 hits in the year, i.e. averaging between 1 and 2 million hits per month which has been normal for the past number of years, (the highest being more than 2 million hits in November 2014), and downloaded more than 233 GB of data during those twelve months.  For the benefit of comparison with other websites, I have given here both the number of visitors and hits since some webmasters speak only of the number of hits their sites receive which does not accurately report the number of visitors to their site. Each visitor to a website generates multiple hits since each page contains many separate items, each of which counts as a hit. So it is more accurate to talk of site visitors rather than hits, but for those who prefer to talk of hits, I also included that information here.

The highest visitors by country during that time were as follows in decreasing order:
44.38% from the US
9.61% from India
6.89% from the UK
5.40% from the Philippines
4.24% from Mauritius
4.22% from Canada
4.14% from Australia

I have statistics for visitors from 172 countries, only some of which are shown in the pie chart below.

Site Statistics

I regularly update and improve little elements of the site. This site is, as it were, constantly under some type of construction and improvement.