Thanks to everybody at work being sick combined with trying to pack boxes and get everything ready for my big move on Monday in extremely hot weather, I’m still smiling. The main reason is I ran the logfile stats for July the other day and Analog reported back that last month the server handled 232,928 page views — the best month yet this year.
The really good part is that this was the biggest month and it was in July. Last July’s page views numbers are pretty much irrelevant since the site had a lot of technical problems due to a bad RAM chip. But in the previous two years the pattern was very similar — July’s page view counts were down about 35 percent from May’s, and August’s page views tended to dip even further.
Which makes sense since most of the visitors to my sites come from North America and they also tend to be disproportionately high school and college students, and during July they’re out doing things besides visiting my site (shame on them!)
But this year July’s stats were 2 percent ahead of May’s stats. The fun part will be to see how this holds up in October. Typically by October all students are back in school and it’s getting on the colder side in North America, and the page view traffic has tended to double July’s performance, which would translate in 460,000+ page views.
I don’t think that’s an unrealistic possibility, especially once the flat bulletin board interface to Conversant is ready.
There are two interesting trends when the page views are broken out by specific site (rather than server-wide). First, AnimalRights.Net is finally back on track with more than 40,000 page views in July. Second, what really surprised me was the large number of page views this site, brian.carnell.com, received — more than 31,000 in July.