Though I was late getting this up, here’s what the stats for 2008 looked like (as collected by the excellent AWStats tool).

2008 was a big year for the site.  After living on free hosting services for almost ten years, tannerhelland.com finally found a real home on a real server (woohoo!).  Rather than static html, the site is now driven by WordPress, and the visual layout is currently derived from the excellent “The Morning After” theme by Arun Kale.  My previous disparate music, programming, and personal blog sites have all been condensed into one messy whole – and I like it.  A lot.

This is what a day on the
frontpage of Digg can do
to your site traffic.

As you can see above, from when the new site launched in August through December 31st, some 20,000 visitors hit the site.  A massive chunk of this (over half) came when my R.I.P. Windows XP article went frontpage on Digg.  What’s funny is that this is one of my least original posts (it’s really more of a rant), and I had absolutely no idea that the article had gone frontpage until I checked my email the next day and had page after page of angry/congratulatory/sarcastic/friendly emails.  I learned a lot from that experience, and subsequent posts have been more carefully constructed…

One of my goals for the coming year is to double each of these stats.  I’d like to see closer to 30,000 unique visitors in 2009, and it’d be great if the number of visits per visitor could get bumped closer to 2.0.  Part of the way I plan to accomplish this is with a renewed emphasis on regular posting (which I hope you’ve enjoyed!) and a host of SEO changes, along with the continual addition of content from my old programming and music sites.  It’s all a work in progress, but hey – at least it’s progressing!

Also, in the coming weeks my general article content will be shifting somewhat. Stay tuned for details – and thanks for visiting.  If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed of your choice at the very bottom of this page!