Sixth grade math was the only class I ever got a C in. I spent the whole following summer doing math exercises with my dad as penitence or practice; it was never entirely clear which. Given that, I’m always surprised that I find numbers so interesting, but its inescapable. Perhaps its an occupational hazard. In IT, our managers love numbers. They provide a convenient way to cover your ass if a decission turns out to be ill advised; “The usage statistics indicated that we could reduce available machines by 20%. Really, I was just trying to save money!”

What’s all this got to do with photography? Nothing. But here’s a neat graph of this site’s viewership patterns.

10 months of stats via www.statcounter.com

Total page views are trending down, but repeat and unique viewer counts are up. I’d say there’s a couple of factors at work there. First, sometime during the late summer I stopped doing the galleries, which had a tendency to inflate the number of pages on the site. Second, I started the second blog, which I think got people coming back more often. Third, while Kate and I were in Korea, a lot of family and friends that didn’t normally look at the site started to check it out particularly in those first few months. Not all of them stayed, but I’m glad that they clicked through so many of the galleries on their way out the door.

In other news, the equipment reviews are getting more hits from the search engines after I made some changes a couple of months back. I still need to transition the reviews into the new site architecture. It will be interesting if the search engine optimization survives the move.

All this stuff is secondary to the actual photography, but I find that monkeying with this site allows me to do something photography related when I’m not feeling all that creative. What’s the photographic equivalent of writer’s block, and what did photographers do about it before they had websites to monkey with?