The year—indeed, the decade—is hours away from being over. Time for a year-end retrospective in numbers. I’ll try to be concise.

Figure 1: Views per Month 2009: What happened!?

Figure 1 reveals something of a roller-coaster of readership. Looks like we just returned to the station, too. Views were down in July because I was in Australia that month, and not really writing. So no-one was reading, either. Then with the start of the semester, my output dropped again, and hasn’t really recovered. The red line is a trendline produced by the latest in statistical analysis techniques—as you can see, it shows a definite upswing in readership over the year. Also, as you can see, it lies.

OK, so people have stopped looking at my blog. But people did look at it: What did they look at?

Readers visiting my blog appear to be very interested in what I run, and what I’d like to run. That’s a little surprising. Unless all those hits were me admiring my collection or desperately trying to recall what I wanted to plan my next purchase. DCC topics and reviews make up the majority of the rest, which is perhaps not unsurprising. I’ll try to keep pumping out DCC articles and product reviews next year to satisfy what few of you are left. My post on Bill’s blog (Tomix N-Gauge Track) remains as popular as it was last year! But that last entry is a bit surprising, however.

Well, who was sending me all this traffic, I wonder?

That JNSForum is my primary source of traffic is unsurprising, because that’s the only place that I actively pimp advertise this site. T Gauge Headquarters sent me a lot of traffic, but since David (the author) and I got into an argument on one of his blogs (I forget which one), he has since unfriended me. So no more traffic from that source—this is no doubt a contributing cause to the downturn in readership. Most of the remainder are acquaintances of mine who also run Japanese train blogs (and who likely make up the core of my remaining readership: Thanks, y’all, for sticking with me!). But what is “Railway Passion”? As it turns out, it’s a forum in Russian about trains and model trains, and they had a thread on favorite foreign models; My Suigun Line diorama got a mention (yay!) which explains the mystery about it above.

What about search engines?

I suppose there is nothing terribly surprising. “Okoba Station” must come from my links to Railmind, who at one point at least was considering modeling that very interesting junction. I do not quite know why a search for “pepakura” turns up my site so apparently reliably (pepakura is Japanese software for producing paper models).

So, there it is: This blog in numbers. Not terribly interesting, but I feel a compulsion to compile this data. In seriousness (or at least, not in half-joking self-deprecation), thanks to all my readers for, well, reading; and especially thanks to those who consistently comment (particularly Quinntopia and Disturbman), because you keep my spirits up, and my keyboard working!