I was trawling through the site stats for 2011 and thought I would share some info. A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,000 times in 2011, not bad considering the stats only cover 11 months, Feb-Dec 2011, as I moved over to WordPress at the end of January. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people. In 2011, there were 132 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 419 posts. There were 131 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 50mb. That’s about 3 pictures per week. The busiest day of the year was April 8th with 149 views. The most popular post that day was Nik Perring – My Life In Short Fiction.

The top five most viewed posts on dan powell – fiction in 2011 looks like this

Visitors arriving via searches mostly arrived by searching for dan powell fiction, dan powell, writers with beards, bright ideas, and typographic book covers.

The top referring site to my blog (excluding facebook, twitter, et al) was Linda Simoni-Wastila’s blog LeftBrainWrite. By way of a thank you I would like to point out that Linda’ s short fiction BREATHE, an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, The Minister’s Wife, is currently the feature story at Metro Fiction.

The most commented on post in 2011 was To MA or not to MA?

These were the 5 most active commenters on this blog:

Looks like Nik Perring missed out on the top spot due to a change of commenting profile. Bad luck, Nik. That said, Jo’s 21 comments since her finding this blog in September 2011 is impressive.

In short then, looks like beards, short stories and creative writing MAs were the favoured subjects by readers of this blog in 2011. Perhaps I should write a facial hair related linked collection of short stories for my MA project and make the most of this public interest. In the meantime I would ask, dear reader, what was your favourite post on this beard and short fiction obsessed little blog?