Now I have to be honest I didn’t exactly know what that meant but I spoke to my son who is the designer of mikeshaft.com and he explained that I had agreed to a certain limit when I signed up for the website, and if I didn’t buy some more bandwidth then the site would close down till the start of next month. (This has actually happened on one occasion since).

So I began to look into what was going on.

My provider has a fantastic service which allows me to see a ton of information about the use of mikeshaft.com going back to the very first day on which I set it up.

As regular viewers will know, I have had a site for a number of years going back I think to 1998, but I only launched mikeshaft.com late in August of 2007.

Looking at the stats it would seem that I had 72 hits in that August of that year. In September, just 1 month later, this had jumped to over 20 thousand hits.

This has grown each and every month with some exceptions.

The best performing month was March of 2009 when the hits exceeded 100,000 for the first time. The record month so far is April 09 when it exceeded 120, 000 hits.

I decided to add up all the hits to mikeshaft.com over the months the site has been in existence and I calculated that sometime in May of this year (2009) that figure would exceed 1,000,000 hits. That figure has now been passed.

Now my son explained to me that this does not mean 1 million people have visited the site. What he said was that if someone visited 1 page that would be 1 hit, if that person goes to another page that would be a second hit and so on.

In other words, an awful lot of pages on mikeshaft.com have been accessed over the last 2 years.

I am delighted that people are finding the site useful. I put an awful lot of time and effort into maintaining it and keeping the design of the site looking good.

For months I have known that people were using mikeshaft.com and I have had some fantastic contacts as a result of the site. Perhaps the one which excited me the most was getting an e-mail from Bobby Kinzer, who found his name on mikeshaft.com.

Kinzer is a true legend of the British game who now lives back in the USA. I was almost in tears as I read his e-mail. (Read the full e-mail and my response here)

I got e-mails from Mark Robinson, Tony Holley and other players. I now get e-mails from agents wanting to place players. I get numerous e-mails from people who used to listen to my radio shows back in the day and who are trying to find tracks, mixes or even full shows.

Recently I got and e-mail from a Spanish website asking if they could use one of my photos. I said no problem thinking it might be a photo of Andre Smith or one of our other top players.

Instead it turned out they wanted to use a photo of Devon van Oostrum who had been signed by a Spanish club.

This kind of thing really makes it all worthwhile.

Perhaps the aspect of the site that I am most proud of is the quality of the photographs on mikeshaft.com and I would like to thank all the photographers who allow me to use their basketball action shots.

I like to take my camera with me wherever I go but I am never going to get the awesome action that Sumo, or Frisky or any of the other great photographers get.

I tend to go more for the photos that show great emotion and it seems that people like them.

I am hoping to put on-line some of the previous web designs I have had over the years. Some are definitely worth a laugh. What has not changed is the quality information that is on the site.

mikeshaft.com in now the place for information and comment about all aspects of British Basketball and I hope to keep it going for many years to come.

Thank you for using mikeshaft.com and do feel free to drop me an e-mail if you can. It’s always great to hear from you.

Later

Mike S

Kiitos – Thank you – Duizendmaal dank – Merci beaucoup
Danke – Hvala lepa – Tusen Takk – Ευχαριστώ – Grazie
Teşekkürler – Хвала вам – Muchas gracias

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