At 1:59 PM PDT today, the beards.org photo gallery hit two million views! Counting began on the 26th of January of 2006 when most of the site’s standalone photo galleries were converted to the current system (Coppermine Photo Gallery). The true number of views is actually higher than what appears on the counter at any time because a hard drive failure on the server a while back forced a recovery from an older version of the database. That rolled the count back by several day’s worth of views. The count also does not reflect the total number of image views on the site since January 26, 2006 because some of the site’s galleries are still standalone — including the popular “original truly outstanding beard gallery” — and image views in those galleries are not included in the count. Nevertheless, the 2,000,000 views milestone is worth some celebrating!

Who was lucky number two million? Patrick of the District of Columbia in the USA:

Click on the photo above to view the full-sized image in the gallery. Congratulations, Patrick! And in a self-congratulatory mood, congratulations to “all about beards” at beards.org!

Let’s just say that June has presented some challenges. Site updates would be a good idea. They’re coming. Stay tuned!

It’s been a rather dramatic day for beards.org. The server on which the site is hosted suffered a disk failure that required restoring the site from a backup. Unfortunately, the latest backup available was from a few days ago. So the beards of the world gallery has temporarily lost three photos and the view counters have been set back a bit. A new comment for the blog was also lost. The gallery images will be restored soon and the commenter on the blog will be invited to re-submit.

While the loss of data is not something enjoyable, at least the data lost this time was relatively minor. Ironically, I was going to take a new backup earlier today, but the server outage had just hit. Had I made it in under the wire, the data loss essentially would have been nil. The lesson here for everyone is one that’s been repeated time and again: back up, back up, back up your data! You’ll be glad that you did.

Also, as a result of the server outage, the site was missing in action for most of the day. I’m happy that it’s back now. I hope that you are, too!

Recently I’ve fallen behind on the beard blogging. I’ve also got a backlog of email awaiting attention. I will be catching up on the email over the next few days. I’ll also get back to posting here on the blog. For now, my posting objective is to have at least a post each week.

In the early days of “all about beards”, I stated on the home page that beards did not always get the respect and appreciation that they deserve. With that, the site had set out on a long-term mission of beard advocacy. A central idea was to create a place on the web to provide helpful information on growing a beard along with plenty of encouragement and some inspiration. Another objective was to provoke some thought on the subject of beards, to challenge the negative attitudes and stereotypes, and to have some fun in the process. In that regard, the site has met with quite a bit of success in the first ten years. However, there’s a lot more to be done. I’m taking the site into its second decade with lots of optimism and new ideas for enhancements and for strengthening the commitment to the mission of “all about beards”.