On January 17, 1996, all about beards first appeared on the worldwide web.  The site started out on web space provided for AOL members.  The host name was members.aol.com.  On January 20, 2005, all about beards officially moved to its permanent home at beards.org.  The legacy all about beards site on members.aol.com was left up for sentimental reasons until AOL pulled the plug on it on October 31, 2008.  All that remains of the AOL site’s legacy is that the official site contact email address is still the original AOL email address that has been used since the January 1996 launch of all about beards.

Today on the site’s fourteenth anniversary, the site is bigger and stronger than ever, with the momentum ever increasing.  More importantly, the site has encouraged and inspired countless men around the world to experience the unique adventure of growing a beard with great success.   The site remains dedicated to “growing better beards worldwide”, “adding more beards to the world”, and increasing the acceptance of beards everywhere.  I’d like to thank all of the beard growers and supporters everywhere whose beard-growing contributions have strengthened all about beards and advanced the bearded cause around the world.

The gallery image counter hit eleven million views on January 6, 2010!  We hit ten million on October 25, 2009.  It would have been nice to hit eleven million before the end of 2009, but this is still close enough!  The eleven million number, however, only represents the number of beard views since the counter started from zero on January 26, 2006.

This time, I wasn’t at the keyboard to see which photo was number eleven million.  In consolation, I’m illustrating this post with a previously-unpublished photo of Christopher.

The gallery views counter hit ten million at 7:41 PM PDT on October 25, 2009!  Which was the prize-winning ten-millionth photo?  Well, Dave wins another one:

Click on the photo above to see the larger, gallery version.  One of Dave’s photos was the winner at nine million views, too.  Thanks again, Dave, and all of the visitors to beards.org!

UPDATE:  I should add, of course, sincere thanks to all of the participants in the beards of the world gallery, too!

At 1:59 PM PDT on August 1, 2009, the view count for the galleries hit nine million!  Which was the winning, nine-millionth photo?  It was this one of Dave, in one of his rare goatee appearances:

Click on the photo above to see the larger, gallery version of the photo.  Next up: ten million!

Three months and one day after hitting seven million photo gallery views, at 17:20 PDT we hit eight million!  Luckily, I happened to be around at the time to watch the counter hit eight million.  Which was the lucky eight-millionth photo?  It was this one of Steven from our featured beards section:

Click on the image above to see the larger version.

all about beards made its first appearance on the web on the 17th of January of 1996. The site’s original objective was to promote beards in a positive manner. Thirteen years later, all about beards is the longest-running beard site on the web and the site remains dedicated to its original mission. We have come a long way, but there’s much more in store. With an eye on a bright future, our thirteenth anniversary year promises to be the best yet!

At 8:42 PM PST, the counter in the galleries hit the seven million mark!  We hit six million back on October 22, 2008.  I would have liked to hit seven million by the end of 2008.  But I’m happy to start off this early in 2009 with such a great milestone.  Keep viewing those great beards in the galleries!

So which photo was the lucky number seven million?  Well, this time I was at the keyboard and was able to see which one it was.  It was this photo of Andrew:

Click on the image above to see the larger version.

At the end of June, the galleries hit five million views.  Late this evening, the counter clicked over to six million views.  I wasn’t at the keyboard when it happened.  I missed seeing it by 188 views.  So I don’t readily know who was lucky number six million.  At five million it was Jason (although it was not this photo — this one does not appear in the galleries at this time):

Click on the photo above to go to Jason’s beard feature.

At 9:55 PM PDT tonight, the counter on the beards.org photo gallery hit five million views!  Amazingly, it was on today’s date exactly one year ago that the gallery hit two million views.  Tonight’s achievement of the five million mark is a symbolic milestone because of the counter reading.  However, the actual count is already higher than that for a number of reasons.  A server failure prior to hitting the two-million mark caused a rollback of the counter.  Deleting photos from the gallery causes their view numbers to get subtracted from the count.  Also, Salvatore’s videos had high numbers of views that no longer show in the count because I took them offline.  I took them offline because they were consuming too much bandwidth.

So which photo was lucky number five million on the counter tonight?  It was this photo of Jason:

Click on the thumbnail image to view the larger image in the gallery.

Congratulations, Jason!  Happy five million!