Pictured at right is a chart I made of the number of visitors to this blog (yes, I am vain). But what surprises me here is the sudden spike in visitors. From May to October last year, I was looking at a hopeful upswing–and then from last October to February of this year, that seemed to stop and even started to fall. All good and well–but then in March something happened–the numbers took off at a strangely linear angle, adding approximately 1,300 more visitors each month.

Has anyone else running a blog understood what makes these numbers change like this? Frankly, I don’t think I did anything different in March than I did in February–no new search engine submissions or significant new links that I know of. A closer look at the numbers showed that visitors coming from search engines, direct submission (RSS or bookmark) and external links all rose about the same. Random fluctuations or trends wouldn’t bother me, but both together seem kinda weird.

Well, regardless of all that, it doesn’t seem like I’m doing anything wrong, so I can’t complain much. So far this month, an average of 650 visitors a day have come, a new high, so it looks like I’ll break 10,000 visitors this month–without outside influence, that is–a MacSurfer link put me over the line last September (I smoothed that part of the chart to erase its effects). And as I’ve said before, even the readership I was getting a year ago startled me–I never expected to get more than a dozen or two regular visitors. Such are the vagaries of the blogosphere.