Happy 1234567890

Wow, what an event that turned out to be! First and foremost thanks to everyone who visited the site, linked to it, tweeted it and so on, without your support the site wouldn’t have
reached its half a million visitors in a single week.

Whats this all about?

For those wondering what 1234567890 really was and what you missed; Bram Cohen (the creator of BitTorrent) does a fantastic job of describing what happened (via revision3)

CoolEpochCountdown.com

Nobody else had created anything similar and I had a week to establish the site. There had been an influx of one page “pointless” websites like www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com and I fancied one for myself. Using www.bustaname.com I stuck in a load of Unix/Epoch keywords and came out with http://www.coolepochcountdown.com - thinking about it now; its a horrible domain but at that didn’t matter. I quickly purchased the domain (£5 from GoDaddy), set up some
space and scurried around with jQuery to get the site into a working state.

I set up a Google Alerts account for the term “1234567890″ and kept abreast of the same term using http://search.twitter.com When anything related popped up I’d visit/reply to the post and let the author know about my site, being careful I didn’t spam them. I did this for the first 20 or so posts/tweets during the first day (a week before the countdown hit) then sat back and watched the site to grow under its own steam.

Counting down

Fast forward 6 days and the website is taking about a thousand hits a minute. It’s Friday the 13th and all these people are watching my website waiting in anticipation for 1234567890 to arrive.

I wanted to treat everyone for sticking with the site and also celebrate the moment. RickRolling did cross my mind but a few hours before the timer hit I added in some nice javascript fireworks and a nice cheesy sound clip (Celebration by Kool and the Gang - http://song.ly/ait)

By the time the counter was about to hit 1234567890 the site had been linked from CNet, The Register, AbstruseGoose, Wikipedia, ThinkGeek and Chris Pirillo. I was worried for my little (mt) server, but thankfully it survived and handled the peak of 25,000 visits. Afterwards was a flurry of communication from fans; I was overwhelmed by the number of tweets and emails from you guys thanking me for the site. Seeing CoolEpochCountdown on your monitors, being projected onto walls and on TV screens all over the world (even Microsoft and Yahoo offices) was quite heartwarming. I’m over the moon it was enjoyed by so many people.

Pictures from the interwebs

Here are a few pictures via emails and tweets from fans around the world who all counted down together. If you’ve got any other pictures please send them this way. Thanks again!