This Sunday (June 10) is Luna’s adoption anniversary, otherwise known as her “Gotcha Day”.
It has been seven years since I encountered her at the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter and she chose me. Here is her official shelter photo:
Luna has of course grown up a lot over the years, but in some ways she hasn’t changed much. Here are some very recent Instagram photos of her:
Please join me in wishing Luna a happy 7th Gotcha Day!
Today we mark the 5th Anniversary of CatSynth!
I started this site on July 19, 2006 as a novelty when a friend and former colleague at E-MU systems suggested that I “should make a website about cats and synths.”
Every anniversary we feature the photo of Luna from the inaugural post.
I still have that Novation keyboard, though it does not get used as often of late. Luna of course still is very territorial about that beanbag chair. Times have changed a bit, here is an iconic photo of Luna from this past year, this time with an iPad app (in this case, the Smule Magic Piano):
Another quirky way we like to celebrate is with statistics. First the basics:
1559 posts.
0.85 posts per day.
8784 comments.
5.63 comments per post.
476 posts featuring cats and synthesizers.
195 reviews (and gig reports).
381,735 visitors.
Even after five years, people from around the world continue to send us pictures of cats and music gear. These days most of those come via our Facebook, which together with twitter has become a major way people engage with this site.
From Google Analytics (which we finally got working properly over the past year), here is an overview of where our visitors come from around the world.
By far and away most of our visitors are from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Australia, France and Germany. I’m gratified to see so many visitors from India, though I’m curious why we never receive any comments from there…
It’s also interesting to look at cities.
Not surprisingly, the top cities are San Francisco and New York. In Google, it’s SF followed by NYC, while in Facebook, New York is the top city.
Our most popular posts judged by number of visitors are the annual endangered wild cats on earth day. Over the past year, our most commented posts were:
Our top commenters the past year:
| Kitty | 199 |
| Mickey, Georgia and Tillie | 146 |
| Gattina | 94 |
| CatSynth | 90 |
| The Chair Speaks | 66 |
| meowmeowmans | 65 |
| Snowcatcher | 56 |
| AVCr8teur | 51 |
| Daisy the Curly Cat | 48 |
| Cats of Wildcat Woods | 41 |
| Beth @ 990 Square | 40 |
Thanks to all our friends (in time zones earlier than U.S. Pacific Daylight Time) who already sent in comments for the anniversary, and to the Cat Blogosphere for their anniversary shout-out!
And while we will continue to keep doing what we do, it has been more of a challenge over this past year to keep up with posts, especially the longer-form reviews. There is a trade between doing music and art, and writing about people doing music and art. But I still love doing everything here, and will find a way…