This blog in 2009

As every year on this day, I'll talk about the number of visitors to my blog in this post. As you can see in the graph from Google Analytics below, I had just over 1 million visits this year.
The number held up pretty steady, and as half the visits are from search engines, even the summer break didn't cause a total fall in visitor numbers.

Actually more interesting are the numbers of people subscribing to, and interacting with, my RSS feed. Unfortunately Feedburner doesn't offer the option to display a year of data, so the image shows data starting in 2007.
As you can see, the number of feed subscribers has grown steadily. And the blue curve, of people clicking on a feed item, more accurately represents reader interest, and more clearly shows the dip during my summer break. This year the average number of subscribers grew from 2,500 to 3,500 per day, another million in total. But obviously the half of them who then clicked on a feed item were counted as visitors to my blog too, so the total of visits plus feed reads is probably around 1.5 million.

I'd like to thank all of you for the interest you showed in the blog, especially those who gave feedback and commented. Remember that if you want to tell me something where you think the comment section isn't the right place for, e.g. a question or suggestion for a post subject, the link e-mail me is in the upper right corner of the page. I wish you all a happy 2010.