Subjects range from a taxonomy of living things to an an overview of religions to nuts and bolts to going to the bathroom in the woods .
The most popular pages as of 2009 are here.

WebRate analysis
DomainInfoFree analysis
AI engines reviews in 2023.

Alexa smart speakers use donsnotes.
Ask "Alexa, is Earth Justice part of the Sierra Club"

As of June 2020 there were over 2,000 pages.
In the last 4 years I averaged 55 new entries per year.
I have 2 other sites a genealogy site with 135 pages and a personal site with 130 pages.

When it was hosted at geocities (2000 - 2009) (www.geocities.com/dtmcbride) the 2,500+ pages here were getting 60,000 hits per month.

The current site is at donsnotes.com, donsnotes.info and donsnotes.org.
The number of hits has dropped because google has downgraded it because many pages are not mobile device friendly according to their criteria, but most browsers adjust page parameters so they look fine..
I'm in the process of gradually upgrading those pages.
In 2023 It was ranked 202,505 internationally at WebRate analysis.
There are about 200 - 300 million active web sites. That would put donsnotes in the top 0.2% of sites.

Beginnings:
I worked in software at Bell Labs, the old AT&T (Bell System) R&D arm, from 1972 - 1980 and many of my friends had e-mail. So I started sharing my notes via e-mail. They ranged from reviews of products or services I was looking into, places I was planning visit on vacation, how to build a pavaer driveway, or just subjects I was interested from politics to religion.

When more people started posting them on dial-up services like CompuServe, The Source and AOL.
In 1984 the software product of the year was FileVision introduced with the Macintosh. It was a better hypermedia platform the HTML is today, so I started putting pages there. My site "Mac Travel Guide" was listed as what's hot in MACazine.
When Apple came out with Hypercard in 1991 I ported it the that platform.
FileVision and HyperCard both had features which still do not exist in the HTML format used by Web browsers.

In 1993 I started writing html using NCSA Mosaic, while at Bellcore and Telcordia.
In 1994 I converted my notes to html and published them on Netscape
For a brief time in 1998-99 I published them on my son's website at MIT.
In 2000 I moved it to geocities (www.geocities.com/dtmcbride) another free site.
When yahoo shut down geocities in 2009 I moved it here to donsnotes. Someone arcived all the geocities pages there. Some of my pages in old-geocities still show up on google searches. I couldn't find anyone to help me replace them with redirects to donsnotes.

I got a lot of hits during the pandemic, because I got tired of the news media reporting absolute number rather than rates. 1,000 new deaths in California is nothing, in Nevada it's significant. I wanted to know the probability of encountering someone with COVID in Berkeley vs Oakland.
So I created a COVID-19 page.

More history:
I worked in software at Bell Labs, AT&T's R&D arm, from 1972 - 1980.
In 1981 I transferred to a job at AT&T, to work on prototype office automation services (e-mail, electronic calendars, on-line data access, ..). I created an internal portal-like information service using dumb terminals (CRTs) connected to a UNIX microcomputer via modems over telephone lines to consolidate information from internal corporate mainframe databases and online information services such as the Source and Compuserve to show how computing could be brought to the desktop. The IBM PC was introduced later in that year. The Internet and TCP/IP protocol came several years later. Among other services this portal provided information to our managers who traveled with information on airline schedules from the Official Airline Guide (OAG) and corporate discount rates for hotels in the headquarter cites of the Bell Operating Companies. It also included corporate indices that AT&T used to track the performance of the 22 Bell telephone operating companies.
This was almost 15 years before big information aggregators, AOL, Yahoo, ...

In 1983 Xerox invited us out to their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to play with a new computer (Alto) that had a icon based graphical user interface controlled by a device called a mouse. It was pretty clear to me this would be the future of personal computing.

In 1985, after the breakup of AT&T, I created a consulting company called DIMEX (Digital Information Management and Exchange).
Note: Google's Mission statement "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", 20 years later is an expansion of this same idea.

Some friends and I worked on a project to develop the next killer application to follow Lotus 1-2-3 (A spread sheet on the new IBM PC under DOS). I was impressed with Ted Nelson's work on hypertext in 1965 and was convinced that it was the future of electronic documents. We used a hypertext application called FileVision on the new graphical user interface computing platform from Apple called Macintosh, which used much of the interface developed at Xerox PARC. We created a set of interactive maps with links to restaurants, ATMs (you had to search to find them in 1985), gas stations, tourist attractions, etc. called Mac Travel Guide, which was written up in several of the Mac magazines. This was 12 or more years before Travelocity and Google maps.

I was also a fan of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog first published in 1968, which had an eclectic mix of tools, products, people, science, philosophy, how to, ...
And I think some of that comes thru in this site.

Many of the maps and graphics here are still hand drawn in Mac Paint a 2-bit (black and white) graphics program designed to fit on the 512x342 pixel screen of the 512K Mac Plus introduced in 1985. Scanners and good mapping software was too expensive then.
Other graphics done in the early 90s are still small (most monitors were VGA [640x480] resolution) done with packages like SuperPaint which had both bitmap and vector graphics .

It was later ported to HyperCard a HyperText application developed by Apple in 1991 based on the smalltalk object oriented programming language. I continued to add topics of interest, including a popular telephone area-code guide searchable by zip code.

FileVision and HyperCard both had features which still do not exist in the HTML format used by Web browsers.

At the same time I developed an Internet portal for Bellcore/Telcorida, the software and R&D arm of the Regional Bell Operating Telephone companies, with indexes to developments in the area of data and voice communications as well as internal project and corporate travel information. It initially used FTP services such as Gopher and Archie and eventually the web in 1994 as the Hypertext markup language (HTML) browser, Mosaic, was developed by Marc Andreessen under NCSA at the U. of Ill.

In 2000 some of the data from this web portal was combined with the original database which had expanded to provide historical information along with information on digital products and services which were exploding at the time and it was moved to Netscape's free web hosting site and then to another free hosting service, geocities.
In 2009 it was moved here when yahoo shut down geocities.

My dream was to create something like wikipedia, but thought it would have to be more tightly managed. Having managed collaborative system design projects and technical reports I found it very hard to get creative people to follow standard, consistent formats, although in the 90's we did not have all the technical tools to enforce consistency. Kudos to Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger and their team for pulling it off.

A 30 year journey to get here, with a lot of fun along the way as technology continued to expanded functionality to make it possible. However, there were features in the 1984 Filevision and 1991 Hypercard which do not exist in 2010 vintage web browsers and many of the problems in todays web (e.g. broken links) would not exist if Ted Nelson's 40 year old model for hypertext had been used.

Around 2015 google started downgrading my rankings because I was not mobile-friendly.
I had adjusted the width of my pages so they would fit on mobile devices of 2012 vintage (iPhone 5 [1136x640], Samsung galaxy S3 [1280x720]).
See tablet screen resolution
So my pages designed for the 342 pixel wide original macintosh 1985 to 800+ pixel monitors in 2005 back to 600 pixel wide smart phones in 2015 and I guess I now have to design them for smart watches.

Problems advertising:

1. I don't like intrusive adds. There are many web pundits, including Tim Berners-Lee who invented the web, who are very upset with the way developers are getting greedy with all the tricks they are using to forcing you into viewing more adds which degrades the user experience.1. I have copyrighted material for which I didn't get permission. In 20 years I've only got 1 request to take a copyrighted image down.

2. Google is downgrading me (I used to get 40,000 unique hits/month) because I'm not optimized for mobile devices. Problem is I have over 2,500 pages and there is not a good global search and replace algorithm to make them all mobile device compatible. I have lots of tables which require a larger display. I did change them to work on a tablet in landscape mode, but they want them to work on a phone. 3. I have copyrighted material for which I didn't get permission. In 20 years I've only got 1 request to take a copyrighted image down.

I haven't given up. If I can resolve these issues I will bidte the bullet. Links:
History of the Internet
History of Hypertext
WebRate analysis
DomainInfoFree analysis