Some useless numbers and statistics to sum up 2008.

mfdc in numbers
It was a record year for web site traffic this year with 79,870 hits from 1,803 unique visitors. In the overall scheme of web site volume 79,000 visitors isn’t all that many but the target audience for this site is meant to be small and this still works out to 218 hits a day which is fine. When I include all the auto crawlers from seach engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc, we had a total of 108,858 hits.

By month the trend looks like this:

I would have assumed that the huge tickup in traffic in November would have come around the time I posted the Disney vacation pictures but after looking at the traffic that wasn’t the case. Someone from France (see below) pretty much went through the entire site in about 10 minutes so it was probably some type of automated collector even though the browser type doesn’t indicate that’s what it was.

Top visitors to the site came from addresses ending in .net, followed by a chunk of unknown, then .com. The next three largest groups came from France (1,961 – 857 being the suspected automated web site crawler from above), Poland (827), and Mexico (772). You Canadian visitors came in 7th with 744 hits.

Excluding the home page, blog home page and rss feeds the most popular page was the January trip to Great Wolf Lodge, Christmas pictures from 2007, and Alex’s Matisse.

The top browsers used to visit the site were Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari (mainly mac users), and Opera. There were 23 hits from a Lynx user which surprises me since Lynx is a text based and out site is pretty much graphics driven. (Then again it was only 23 hits, only for the home page, but it spanned from January to September so whoever it was kept coming back.)

Blog Posts
Compared to previous years I managed to get out a couple more blog posts then years past with 70 items. That accounts for 24% of all posts and I’ve been posting on or off since July of 2004. It’s hard to beleive that it’s been that it’s been that long which got me thinking how long I’ve had this site up. Looking at the WHOIS record I’ve owned mfdc since October of 2001. Holy cow, 2001. I remember I got the site while Jen was pregant with Alex as a good way to share pictures with the family. (And now she’s pregant again….cue twilight zone music.)

Swim Numbers
Ever since I was in high school I’ve more or less kept track of all my workouts. It’s a habit one of my old coaches got me into and it’s been impossible to break. It doesn’t feel like a complete workout until I’ve written it down and recorded the yardage.

This year I swam 290,600 yards which works out to about 165 miles (265 km). February and March were really down months since I took them off due to surgery so I’m relatively pleased with how far I went. The thing that’s aways a little surprising to me is that it was only 165 miles for the whole year since it sure feels like way longer while I’m in the pool. On a map 165 miles doesn’t look all that impressive and depending on which way I go from our house it doesn’t even get me out of the state.

So instead of ploting how far I’ve gone horizontally how about looking at it vertically. According to Google Earth this is what the view of our house would look like from 165 miles up. More impressive if you ask me.

Netflix
According to Netflix we rented 61 movies last year and I wactched 1 online using the “Watch Now” feature. That works out to more movies then remember watching in previous years and now that I know how many it is I feel like I’m getting my money’s worth even if I’m not one of those 260+ movies a year type person.

There you go, the 2008 ocd numbers summary.