Byte-counting

March has been another huge month, even bigger than February:

March 2009:
Posts: 154 (average of 35 per week)

Comments: haven't had time to count up yet! (average of four most commented posts: [77+56+55+44]/4 = 58)

Most commented on post: The Catholic Church hates girl children by Deborah (gee I can't think why that was controversial!) got 77 comments, mostly debating abortion.

Also popular in the comment department: Maia's Reasonable Opinions attracted 56 comments, Gina's guest post Paul Henry makes a bad bad choice has 55 (and still growing), and Deborah's On rape and consent garnered 44.

Guest posts: March was the Month of the Guest Posts, not through any deliberate strategy on our part, but just because opportunities became available. First up there was Carol's piece on Helen Clark and all that talk about her sexuality, then Luddite Journo's views on women journalists and their objectivity. katy contributed some gruesome excerpts from an article about the re-construction of Michelle Obama. Most recently Gina wrote for us about why Paul Henry's actions on Breakfast were unacceptable. All have been very popular, even when they haven't attracted many comments, so thank you for showing your support for our guest posters by making with the clicky and reading their words.

Page loads: 26,960 (870 a day)

Biggest day: 30th March, 1,589 page loads (our new biggest day ever, presumably as a result of the ongoing debate about Paul Henry deciding a woman's appearance was far more important than what she had to say). This was a bit of surprise as the Pay Equity Faxathon gave us two enormous days too, which I thought might stand as new highs for a while.

Unique visitors: 16,724 (539 a day)

These last three sets of stats are all based on Statcounter, and have been for all the previous byte-counting posts. Extreme Tracking results were very similar, slightly lower in general, don't know why! I'll be continuing to report the Statcounter ones because they require less effort on my part. Our Tumeke ranking is based in part on the Extreme Tracking daily uniques figure, which was 425 for February (Statcounter showed 444).

Our Tumeke blog ranking for February: 12th


Coming up in April:

• Possibly a Wellington Hand Mixer
• Hopefully a guest post that I am quite excited about...
  

Past byte-counts:
February 2009 stats.
January 2009 stats.
December 2008 stats.
November 2008 stats.

Thanks yet again to all who make The Hand Mirror work - readers, writers, lurkers, commenters, members of our Facebook group, and linkers :-)