The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 29,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 7 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Quite aside from the official review, I find myself wondering if WordPress has changed anything in the way they count statistics. Or was I just getting a Christmas rush?

At the beginning of December my highest number of views per day (157) was in 2010, when I threw my brand-new blog open to the creative writing class at the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival. That day (in fact, the 2 weeks the blog was open to the class) was totally out of line with the usual hits on the blog. More often in those early months, I averaged 250 views a month — about 8 views a day. That has been steadily increasing, but it was still a better than average day when I got 70 views.

Until the last four months, and particularly until December.

I had 158 views (a new record) on December 5, tied it on December 9, broke it on December 11 with 162, broke that on December 13 with 198, went above 200 views for the first time the next day with 203, and broke that 2 days later with 208 views on December 16.

Interestingly it is not the current posts that are getting all the traffic. The top posts are old ones – outdoor ice sculptures, DVD reviews (especially about dinosaur DVDs,) coat color genetics in horses (now being reissued with new photographs,) and a quiller who had a stall next to that of the Alaska Writers’ Guild at the Farmers’ Market last summer and made quilled Christmas ornaments and jewelry.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the holidays are over. I broke 4500 views for December after breaking 3000 in November, but was this a flash in the pan from people researching holiday preparations and gifts? It would be nice to think more people were at least being exposed to my book covers.