So I missed restoring a download yesterday; two will be up and running by the end of the day today as a result.

In the interim, let’s revisit a point of interest. Previously, in September of 2009, I offered a look at the site’s download statistics:

Total Files: – 197
Total Size: – 3.0 GiB
Total Hits: – 4,295
Total Bandwidth: – 50.0 GiB

Those numbers were pretty impressive; they represented the sum total of download traffic that Aiera had seen since mid-April of 2009, and then with only about half her downloads actually in a functional state.

Here are the current numbers:

Total Files: – 340
Total Size: – 7.5 GiB
Total Hits: – 31,403
Total Bandwidth: – 902.1 GiB

So…let’s review. The count of files available for download has increased about 173%, and the total storage footprint of the downloads has increased by 250%. The count of clicks on download links, meanwhile, has increased by a whopping 731%.

And then there’s the bandwidth. Since April 15th of last year, Aiera has served up nearly a binary terabyte of downloads to Ultima fans; bandwidth has surged ahead a mind-boggling 1804% since last September.

I don’t often bleg, and won’t make a habit of doing so, but if any of this has any meaning to any of you, perhaps contemplate hitting up the tip jar, which you can find, right-aligned, at the bottom of the “single post” view of any article or project entry on the site. The hosting and bandwidth doesn’t pay for itself, after all.

Fair warning for everyone: I’m thinking of installing a download manager on the site, so I apologize if, over the course of the next few days, downloads are a bit spotty (or outright unavailable). If during this time you have need of a specific download, let me know in the comment form to this post and I’ll attempt to make it available for you.

What these changes will let me do is keep accurate file-size information associated with each downloadable file, and give me the ability to track which files are most commonly downloaded. I’ve never really researched the download traffic at Aiera fully, and already today there have been 56 files downloaded from the site — impressive, to say the least, and I look forward to seeing where these stats will go in the coming weeks and months.

Download links at project entries should work, although to take advantage of all of the download manager’s features I’ll have to go through and re-tag all the links., so I apologize if I render temporarily unavailable something you’d had your eye on, O Reader. It’s a lot of work, but that’s okay — it gives me an excuse to go through the site and affix tags to all the project entries, something I’ve been meaning to do anyhow.

As with any project of this nature, the possibility of mistakes exists. If you notice, O Reader, that a download link in any of the categories mentioned below has stopped working, let me know in the comments (provide a link to the project, please!) and I will endeavour to make with the fixing in a timely manner.

Progress Log:
February 26th, 2008:

• Akalabeth is done
• Ultima 1 is done
• Ultima 2 is done
• Ultima 3 is done
• Ultima 4 is done
• Lazarus is done (it’s got enough linked files to be its own category!)
• Ultima 5 is done
• Ultima 6 is done

February 27th, 2008:

• Underworld 1 is done
• Savage Empire is done
• Martian Dreams is done

February 29th, 2008:

• Ultima 7 is done

Keep checking back for updates! In the meantime, it may interest you all to know that, for today (Feb. 26, 2008) at least, the most-downloaded file is the Ultima 9 Combined Update fan patch.