Last month have been very impressive for lighty. Every month I was waiting for the statistics gathered by NetCraft about the usage from web-server software on the net. We all know that Apache has 70% of the market, but as every month I check the detailed reports too see where lighty is now: place 30, 19000 installations.

And somehow this information got leaked to our last few missing distributor as I got mail from Zak (Ubuntu), darix (SuSE) and Ernest (Apple).

Up to now we could savely work under the radar. From time to time we got more attention and lighty got included into the FreeBSD ports, later OpenBSD, NetBSD and Gentoo. Fedora integrated lighttpd also quite early in the extra packages and back in the day I submitted a package to cygwin. Ah, not to forget Joerg who builds packages for SGI Irix.

But now three new distributions want to package lighty in basicly the same time. As far as I can see the numbers netcraft is counting are correct and reflect the number of users who ask their favourite packager to include lighty into the regular distribution so that they don’t have to package it for their own. I just find it interesting that those 3 get this idea in the same week :)

A log time ago (at the end of last year) I wrote a mail to the mailinglist about “NetCraft December 2004 and the future of lighttpd” :

> My goal is to get into the 1000 until summer next year which basicly
means to we have as many users as boa. Is there something that can be
improved to attract more users (beside fixing bugs) ? Do we need a logo,
mascot, … ? Mugs, t-shirt ? :)

We reach that in May 2005 already and have a 20 times higher user-count too. But I want more :)

As we are on the radar now anyway I can do what I got asked for a few times now already: do presentations about lighttpd on conferences around the globe. I already did a ad-hoc presentation about lighttpd at the linuxtag last year in Karlsruhe, Germany. But for next year I want to got to more places. At which conference would you like to see a presentation about lighttpd ?

Next to the big conferences I’m happy to give a talk at a UG meeting near you when I’m around like:

• Jan 12 – Jan 31, 2006: Buenos Aires, Argentina (vacation)
• (hopefully) Apr 24 – Apr 27, 2006, Santa Clara, CA, USA (MySQL UC)

Other plans are at least submitting talks to OSCON, FOSDEM and Linuxtag.