Five years Unofficial Damian O’Hare

Remember when the kids insisted they absolutely wanted that cute wee puppy, and you ended up looking after a drooling 120kg St. Bernard  for the next ten years? With websites, it’s the same. What starts out with “just a bit of help with the html” can easily lead to you sitting here and looking back at five years of resizing screencaps and marvelling at the countless variations of spelling “Damian O’Hare” people come up with.

What’s the point of a website about a relatively unknown actor? People with a shared interest like to meet, whether that’s in a football stadium or online doesn’t really matter. Cheer on a player or an actor, no difference. A stamp collector will be just as happy when finding that one specific stamp to complete his collection as I’ll be on the day when I’ll finally manage to hunt down that cursed “If…” episode. Call it the Panini Syndrome, if you like. That aside, we agreed even back in 2007 that Damian wasn’t relatively unknown but not famous yet, which is a huge difference:

So “Unofficial Damian O’Hare” is five years old today – happy birthday to us! To celebrate, we tried to drum up some funds for charity “Magic Breakfast”, which feeds some of the 700,000 children who arrive at school too hungry to learn every day. The first target was met within 24hrs, and we’re almost there with the new target, so if you feel like supporting this great cause, here’s your chance:

So far, we’re at an amazing £ 180, which translates to 818 breakfasts! Woohoo! Thanks so much to all you generous people out there who donated; here’s your “thank you” card from “Magic Breakfast”. Artist Alessia gifted us with a breakfast bagel. 🙂

Unofficial Damian O’Hare consists of 98 individual pages and ~2000 files. So far, the website has attracted about 250’000 individual visitors (give or take a couple of thousand; those who have their cookies disabled or surf cloaked aren’t counted). Visitors come from all corners of the world, with the USA and the UK being in the lead.

If you’re curious about the countries where visitors come from, just click on the link below to see the detailed list.

“News” aside, the most popular pages are Damian’s biography and the galleries. Top keywords are “damian o’hare”, “damian o’hare actor” and “damian o’hare shirtless”. So it won’t surprise you to learn that this is the most popular picture on the website:

Hits skyrocketed during “Hatfields & McCoys”, with visitor numbers increasing tenfold; “Ellison Hatfield” was obviously a very popular character with the audience.

Special thanks to all the great people who continue to support the website: Damian’s fans for all their contributions, Frank for technical help and VG information and Andreas S. for his translation work.

To the next five years – cheers!