Never Forget Tribute — Sixty Million Hits

Just a few minutes ago, the counter on the Never Forget Tribute advanced past sixty million hits. Each time the graphic is served up on web pages that embed the tribute, the hit counter advances by one. Damsel and I thank those of you who have taken the time to embed the tribute on your websites. It’s people like you who know that America, and the World, can Never Forget. We are grateful that so many of you care.

In less than a year, the graphic has received ten million hits. Last March 15th, the counter clicked past fifty million. You can see the progress in the sidebar (if you have JavaScript enabled) which gets updated every several seconds thanks to the AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) script I developed to place under the graphic. Watch it for a while and you will see the counter advancing as websites all over the world serve up an instance of the tribute.

The animation was originally inspired by an anonymously-produced PowerPoint slideshow making the rounds on the Internet and via emails after 9/11. I gathered some of the graphics and produced the prototype of the graphic to display on my personal website. After refinements and improvements suggested by Damsel and others, it appears as it does today. This is the graphic seen in the right sidebar depicting the attacks on America by terrorists. Last year, I added the tribute to the U.S.S. Cole to the package. Prior to that, I included the graphics for Flight 93 to the original tribute.

In August of 2005, I made the animation available to anyone. The offer was only taken by a few sites at first, but since then, many more have begun displaying the animation. As of December 2005, there were over 200 sites linking to it, and that number has been growing since. Sites in the US, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Norway, the UK, Italy and several other countries, display the tribute on their pages.

To all of you displaying the tribute, thank you for reminding your readers to Never Forget.