This morning I assembled all the log files for all my sites and ran it through a log analyzer. In September I had close to 170,000 page views (i.e. when someone actually brings up a page, as opposed to hits since there are several files that are accessed with each page). Assuming things go as they did in the first two weeks, the total page views for this September will only reach about 105,000.
At first, the discrepancy really weirded me out until I looked closer at the numbers and noticed that almost two-thirds of the “missing” page views were accounted for by 404 errors — pages that should be there but are not for a variety of reasons (usually due to a typo in a filename). So that is what I will be doing this week — scouring the logs and fixing all the 404 errors.
On the other hand, there was good news in that unlike my weight, which has been headed down over the past two weeks, the page view count is definitely on an upward swing. Currently this web site will easily break the 1999 level of 2,000,000 page views, but probably not by as much as I had initially hoped for — 3 million page views is probably out of the question for 2000, with 2.6 or 2.7 million more likely.
On the other hand, over the long term I am much more positive about growth. Now that I am getting caught up in other things and getting the site under control, the Conversant system will make it easy for me to add an additional 1,000 or so pages a year to the various sites. over time as those get indexed by search engines and attract more visitors, I think it is reasonable to expect that I can achieve my ultimate goal of 1 million page views a month within the next 2-3 years (especially since I will be taking a year off starting next Fall to focus exclusively on the web sites).