Panitikan.com.ph, 1,000,000 hits and counting
The Internet is the temple of the temporal. What you’re staring at your computer right now isn’t real, a solid object, an actual physical thing. It is ethereal. A website is here today, gone tomorrow. Blogs, pages, entire portals disappear into the netherworld of servers, databases, connectors and mainframes. Megabytes of data pour into homes The Matrix-like but awaken no Neos and Trinitys. Only a few sites survive; those who have built up their brand names, those who have amassed regular visitors, those which earn money.
Just a few days shy of its birthdate (February 11), panitikan.com.ph notched up its 1,000,000 hit on February 5, 2007. The visitor may have been from the Philippines. Or he or she could have been from China, Japan, the United States of America or Qatar. The mega-hit passed unbeknownst to him. It was actually history in the making.
Panitikan.com.ph began in the last few months of 2005 but had been envisioned by Vim Nadera long before he was UP ICW director. Proposals and website designs were hewn and crafted by its hopeful staff even without the guarantee of the project actually pushing through. Finally, in December of that year, the National Commission on Culture and the Arts gave the nod.
More than three hundred author profiles, five hundred literary works, and countless news articles later, panitikan.com.ph got its millionth visitor on a Monday, the weekday which has the largest percentage of visitors. It was only a matter of time. Just this year, the website’s record high reached over 8,000 hits a day, up by 2,000 from last year’s record.
Up for project renewal this year, the website plans to expand to Visayas and Mindanao even as it attempts to record the comings and goings of Filipino literati and more anthologize literary works and. This push to augment and expand bodes well for Philippine literature as panitikan.com.ph strives to be its face in the chaos and ephemera of the Internet. Posterity and certainty are values, in the realm of the Internet, which are all the more sought after.
By Arvin Abejo MangohigPanitikan.com.ph Project Coordinator