What? December 31st already? High time for our annual review. This year we’ve decided to get technical and share some of our 2011 web statistics.

Where did this year’s 51,316 visitors come from? It’s no surprise that the majority were from the U.S. followed by Canada and then the U.K. D’uh oh.

Hard to believe, but this week Felderfans.com celebrates six years online.

Quite honestly, we never expected the site to grow as it has. What started out as an HTML trial-and-error sandbox has evolved into full-blown social media geekdom. Thanks to Don and to those who have kindly donated images and other content over the years. Without your support, we’re not sure if we’d still be here today.

A word about our site commenting: After years of battling comment spam, last year we discontinued the fan forum and implemented Facebook’s social commenting system.

We’ve updated the site’s popular “Guitar Q & A with Don” section with the latest round of readers’ guitar and gear questions. Topics on tap this time around include pedal steel amps, 12-string acoustics, the tuning on “Good Day in Hell” and a mysterious black Gretsch. Find out what Don has to say over on the Q & A page.

Felderfans.com wishes all our readers a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year!

The beginning of 2010 marks our five year anniversary on the web. Since its inception, we’ve been amazed at how the site has taken on a life of its own and, quite frankly, due to the sheer number of music and fan sites on the internet, we never really expected to still be here today.

The number of site visits has steadily increased since 2005 and this past year saw close to 80,000. What’s more, over 45% of you are return visitors. We’ve got a couple of New Year’s site resolutions we want to fulfill in 2010, so stick around. As always, we appreciate your input, comments and questions. All you have to do is just drop us a mail.

Last but not least, thanks Don, for your support. Whatever you do, don’t stop rockin’!

If you visit the site regularly you’ve probably noticed that we’ve been testing a few of those social network buttons you see all over the internet these days, namely Facebook’s “Share” and Tweetmeme’s “Retweet.”

By clicking on the blue Facebook icon, visitors can re-post specific articles and a thumbnail (if desired) from this site directly to their Facebook wall. The green Retweet button works basically the same way via a Twitter account: the site name, the post’s title and a shortened link back to it will automatically appear in the 140-character text area ready for re-tweeting.

We were a little hesitant about all this at first (hey, deep down inside we’re old school) but have gone ahead and caved in to the latest trend. The buttons are bit quirky and require a little coding trial-and-error, meaning there’s a chance at first you may get sent to virtual purgatory, so please bear with us. We appreciate your being sociable!