Updating, this is the original Page of Rafe Champion. It is free of charge but it became colonised by advertising popups and that plus other limitations helped to prompt the change of site.
More additional stuff below the original post.
My late wife, the author and artist Kilmeny Niland set up a website on Homestead in September 2002 to display my work on Popper, Bartley and Hayek. An earlier site at Fortune City was too clunky and limited in the colours, fonts and other features for her liking. We called it The Rathouse, an irreverent Australian tribute to the Rathaus, the Great Hall of Vienna which was one of the venues for the Popper Centenary Conference earlier that year.
In the eight years there have been 328,000 “hits” or visits, with an average of 112 per day. After the first few months there has been very little variation in the level of activity with some wavelike ups and downs, and little lows at obvious times like the Christmas holidays. Surprisingly the level was rather low for much of this year, (below the longterm daily average), surprising because I would have hoped for steady growth rather than decline, given the steady increase in the amount of stuff on the site and the extension of the content into Austrian economics, classical liberalism and some areas of literature and cultural studies. In the last month it has equally surprisingly, for no obvious reason, ticked up to average near 140 hits per day.
The statistics have to be interpreted with care because the overwhelming majority of visitors only look at a single page and many have obviusly turned up by mistake – googling Dostoyevsky who only appears on the site in list of names, for example.
The most popular pages at present are What is this thing called science (averaging 10 visits per day over the last few days), Clancy of the Overflow (9), Jacques Barzun (7) Review of The Sociological Imagination, Index, Objective Knowledge, Essentialism (6), The Factory System, The Buhlers (5), Wellek (4), Entry to OSE Condensed (3).
The most disappointing pages in terms of the statistics are the chapters of the condensed OSE. The main or entry page scraped into the top group that average 3 or more hits per day but the others score a hit or two on some days and so average 1 per day, or less. And these tend to be one off hits, not visitors who read systematically to work their way through the whole book, or even parts of it.
Update. The original aim of the site was quite modest, simply to take the cheapest option for self-publishing, following the small book of essays Reason and Imagination which we produced in the year 2000 for private circulation. Kilmeny selected the font and did the layout then the pdf went to a firm which was offering a really good deal with digital printing.
Personal websites were a novelty in those days and we set up a Guest Room for other people. Roger Sandall was one of the first guests and he soon went on to set up a quality site of his own. Peter Coleman is a guest, he was a stalwart in the international movement to fight communism in the world of culture and ideas. I will review his latest collection of papers for the CIS Policy quarterly.
John Stone gave us a paper called “Deregulate or Perish” which came on the site in 1985, alongside the The Austrian Key which explained the significance of the Austrian ideas in the debate about winding back tariffs and centralised wage fixing. People who think that correlation equals causation will be excited to read that about a year later the Government started to move in that direction. For what it is worth, I have not met anyone who has been influenced by anything that I have written on economic policy. After about 40 years of writing about Popper (on and off) I know half a dozen or maybe a dozen people who are pleased to know about him. That looks like failure but sometimes I think I am just getting warmed up.
Soon after the site launched with the core of Popper, Bartley and Hayek pieces, the scope expanded with the first of the Revivalist Series. The aim was to “revive” the profile of some wonderful scholars who had become invisible or out of fashion, first, in December 02, Yvor Winters, Jacques Barzun and the Australian James Mcauley, then in May 03 Liam Hudson and the Australians R D Fiszgerald (poet) and Barry Humphries (entertainer), followed by the Buhlers and Wellek in September 03 and the great trio of Hutt, Bauer and Suttie in August 04. The next on the list were R G Collingwood and Edmund Wilson but Kilmeny became too busy with books to build the site. I was not allowed to touch the site at that stage but when she became ill I had to learn how to edit and add material, using the format and templates that she set up.
The effort with Winters, the Buhlers, Wellek and Suttie has been very worthwhile because they had next to no net presence and at last check using Google the Rathouse links come up on the first page for each of them.
