Grazie Mezzo Milione

The Italians have a lovely expression for ‘thank you very much,’ grazie mille, which literally means “thanks a thousand.”  Americans, in our unending desire to super-size have turned this into “thanks a million,” but this excessive exaggeration actually cheapens the sentiment in my view.  Who really has a firm grasp of the concept of a million?

Border Wars passed several large milestones (which used to mark  1,000 double paces in the Roman empire, thus the name mile = thousand) in February.  The success of the Westminster Rewards Cruelty post resulted in a single day record for this blog of 24,235 hits on Valentine’s Day.  Way to show the love, readers. This post went viral big time and February saw over 100,000 views.  Grazie cento mille.

The Westminster Rewards Cruelty viral traffic spike.

To put that in perspective, the blog had 272,265 hits all of last year.  Based on January’s 38,000 hits the blog was looking to record 465,000+ hits this year, a decent amount of growth.  But the Westminster surge will surely make that goal too low.  In fact, the viral post helped the blog burn past 500,000 total hits with 400,000 of those since January 1st of 2011.  Amazing to me, really, for this little dog blog with rather dense content to draw such interest, especially in the rapid nature of its growth this last year and some.

February 2012 BorderWars blog visitor stats.

More than 115 of you now subscribe to one of the three duplicate feeds–a legacy of moving from blogger to wordpress with feedburner–and over one hundred currently receive the blog over e-mail.  You’ve left 3,333 comments to through February and none of this appears to be slowing down.

Grazie mezzo milione.  Thanks a half a million.

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About Christopher

Christopher Landauer is a fifth generation Colorado native and second generation Border Collie enthusiast. Border Collies have been the Landauer family dogs since the 1960s and Christopher got his first one as a toddler. He began his own modest breeding program with the purchase of Dublin and Celeste in 2006 and currently shares his home with their children Mercury and Gemma as well. His interest in genetics began in AP Chemistry and AP Biology and was honed at Stanford University.