Google Analytics screen copy:

As you can see, really, the million award came only because, last week, there was a sharp peak of more than 80,000 visits in a day (I kept oscillating between 900,000 and 1,000,000 visits but could not jump this symbolic barrier). And it comes with nearly 1.5 million printed pages (another deeply symbolic figure to reach).

What is funny is that this load peak (perfectly handled by the OVH web server) just came a few days after the personal experimentations I was mentioning here to optimize Roumazeilles.net and YLovePhoto.com performance. As a matter of fact, the actions that I applied were really representative of what must be done to have a web site doing much more than the usual web business card:

• A small dedicated server (much better than the shared web hosting services which are really cheap but stay very limited in case of a sharp traffic increase);
• WordPress in a recent version (here, version 3.0.1);
• The W3 Total Cache plugin to optimize the cache and the performance of the WordPress web site (my analysis of W3 Total Cache);
• Reducing the less-than-important operations through the search for low performance using the performance analysis tool of your web site;

But on top of the technical face of the case, I am not a little proud of having received more than a million visits.

The biggest single US dollar bill

This is not even really a bill since it’s more a tool to manage gold exchanges in an economy that was based on gold: a gold certificate. It was never circulated in the public since 1034, and is only visible in museums.

Source: PurpleSlinky.com.

The weird Zimbabwe bills

In a country where the economy totally collapsed, the Zimbabwe dollar has no value left: Inflation reached several tens of thousands of percents (much more than what hit the German economy of the 30’s), crushing the mere value of any bill in just days.

As a matter of fact, this 10 million dollar bill does not allow you to pay anything (valued a few euros a few months ago, it’s really worthless now).