Like every self-respecting geek blogger, I spent my New Year’s holiday crunching the numbers from my 2002 access logs. I only have logs starting in February; before then I was using another hosting provider that didn’t provide raw access logs. Note to all geek bloggers: if your hosting provider does not provide raw access logs, dump them immediately and switch to Cornerhost (which I use) or some other provider with half a clue. You’ll thank me one day.

Now then, as anyone who has been idly tracking my statistics page throughout the year already knows, 2002 was a banner year for me. On February 1, I had 274 unique visitors (measured by unique IP addresses). The numbers rose steadily; by the end of May, I was averaging just over 1000. Then 30 days to a more accessible weblog skyrocketed me to over 2000. October was my best month ever, with an average of 3200 unique visitors every day. I took most of November off, and by the end of the year my daily readership had slipped to a comfortable 2600.

[Unique visitors per day in 2002]

2002 was also the year of the news aggregator. On Feburary 1, I had 55 unique visitors hitting my RSS feed. On December 11, I had 843. And those are only the ones I could identify; I suspect there were dozens of other private scripts running their own homegrown aggregation routines.

Here’s the breakdown of the number of people hitting my site with the four most popular news aggregators. Keep in mind that this counts unique IP addresses, so even if your aggregator was banging away on several different feeds 24 times a day, you’re still only counted once.

[2002 news aggregator users per day]

As I mentioned, October was my best month of 2002. 7 of my top 10 highest traffic days were in the first two weeks of October, due to a string of widely linked articles:

The other highest traffic days were all in October and November: