March Roundup

April 1st landed at an inconvenient time for me, so this is a couple days late. I know how much everyone looks forward to these posts.

March was slower than the last fewer months with 291 visits. The difference is pretty simple to explain: Not posting links on Facebook has cut into my repeat visitor traffic. New visitors consistently out-numbered returning ones nearly every day in March. Some were following track-backs or landed here from search results, but most came straight to the home page. I'm not sure how. Or why.

Operating system results were similar to previous months with Microsoft OS's accounting for 86% of visits, Mac bringing in 6.2% and Linux at 2.1%. Various mobile OS's accounted for the balance. I am once again surprised at how badly Win7 is doing relative to WinXP and even Vista. XP will be 9 years old in October; that's like 209 in OS years, and yet it still accounts for 70% of our visitors who run Windows. If that is in any way representative of Windows users in general, Uncle Bill is in some deep doo.

But Uncle Bill must be doing something right on the browser front: IE8 is a run-away favorite among our readers at 44.3%. Combined with the smattering of other IE versions, Microsoft's share of browser mind-share is 55.3%, followed at a vast distance by Firefox (25.8%), Chrome (9.1%), and Safari (4.8%). Unlike IE6, which was the best thing to ever happen to Firefox, IE8 seems to be firmly in good-enough-to-not-bother territory, which is bad for alternative browsers who seem, at least among our readers, to be cannibalizing each other for an ever-shrinking piece of pie (to make an odd mix of metaphors).

Nearly 1/3 of the March traffic was through referrers. We seem to be the new darlings of Google who sent us nearly 10% of our visitors this month. There was also a good deal of traffic from mutual links and track-backs, but fewer than previous months. I find that a bit odd given that I've been more active in commenting and linking over the last month. (shrug) Who knows? The most frequent search term was "bob has surprise visitor" which has nothing to do with anything we've ever posted. Given that all those searches originated in Europe, I assume it must have something to do with something on the boob tube over there. And this month there is a tie for the most humorous search terms: "rainbow farting unicorns" and "chasing the rainbow fart". Which is as good a place as any to end this post as any.