Lies, Damn Lies & Statistics

Hello everyone, today I’d like to share a joyous announcement with you. I posted about this on my microblogs a couple of days ago so some people might already have seen it, but I think it warrants a proper write up. In January of this year I moved this very blog from it’s old home on Blogger.com, packed it all in bubble wrap and brought it to my own domain DanLynch.org. I set it up here for self-hosting with WordPress and since then I’ve been posting more regularly, or at least trying to. The volume of posts ebbs and flows depending what else is going on in my life, as we’ll see in a minute. But overall it’s been a successful move I think and I’m really happy. I still haven’t done that custom design I keep threatening or god knows how many other jobs I have in mind, but it’s going along well. It was late January when I moved the site and in this week I passed 200,000 visits since the move. Here’s an image to prove it…

Ok, so stats aren’t everything I know. They can be inaccurate and I really have no way of proving whether it’s true or not, but the site seems busy enough. I did use Google Analyitics for a while but it seemed to slow page loading down badly and I dropped it. These stats are from the official WordPress Stats package. As you can see, the busiest day so far was October 30th when I got 5285 visits. That was the day I published my Ubuntu 9.10 review and rode the wave of publicity surrounding the release. I’m not too proud to piggyback some of the limelight off others, but much like other things I’ve done it wasn’t at all planned. I intend to keep posting Weeky Rewinds and long rambling distro reviews here for as long as I can. As well as maybe some other off the wall posts, my political rants for example. I keep saying this but I am in the process of working out the new all-in-one design for this blog and it’s parent site. I hope to get that done sometime over Christmas. We’ll see how that works out. I also wanted to share with you the monthly stats for this year so far. I’ve still got a couple of months left until this covers a full years worth of stats and who knows, maybe I can get to 250,000 visits in that time. I’ll be trying.

Much of the traffic I receive is down to referrals from the likes of Distrowatch, Linux Today, Tuxmachines and others. I’m truly grateful for that and I hope it continues. I have no contact with the people running these sites, but should they read this I just wanted to say thank you. It’s also down to the good people like yourself who come here to see what I’ve written, so give yourself a pat on the back from me. I would do it myself but I can’t reach you all 🙂 Let’s hope I can keep building on this momentum and make 2010 as much fun as 2009. To infinity and beyond!!

Thanks for reading,

Dan