The dawning of the new financial year indicates that a much more important occasion is upon us: today, this blog is five years old. As has been the tradition over the last half-decade, this is the one day I do blog stats. So here they are. (Yikes – I see I used almost exactly the same introduction last year).

Previous three years’ figures are in brackets, last year’s first.

• 3 (2, 2, 2, 2): number of servers this site has been hosted on
• 2 (2, 2, 2, 2): number of blogging applications used
• 1,123 (977, 873, 588, 226): total number of posts
• 1,614 (1,518, 1,350, 774, 444): total number of comments
• 1.44 (1.55, 1.55, 1.32, 1.96): average number of comments per post
• 112,651 (70,993, 43,016, 6,322): total unique hits (counting since May 2004 – now switched to Google Analytics, which counted 6,000 fewer this last year than my old hit counter)

Top seven referring websites (excluding search engines):

• 7 (-): Liberal England
• 6 (-): Nothing Tra La La?
• 5 (-): British Blogs
• 4 (3): Liberal Democrat Voice
• 3 (2): LibDem Blogs
• 2 (-): Twitter
• 1 (1): Wikipedia

Top nine referring blogs:

• 9 (-): Niles’s Blog
• 8 (8): Naked Blog
• 7 (-): Andrew Reeves’ Running Blog
• 6 (-): ConserativeHome (srsly)
• 5 (-): Love and Liberty
• 4 (7): Chicken Yoghurt
• 3 (3): Liberal England
• 2 (-): Nothing Tra La La?
• 1 (1): Liberal Democrat Voice

Top ten search terms:

• 10 (-): baroness ashton
• 9 (-): matt smith dr who
• 8 (-): england census 1911
• 7 (-): new doctor who announced
• 6 (6): toby stephens
  (He just won’t go away. This is why. *shrug*)
• 5 (-): matt smith doctor who
• 4 (-): new doctor who
• 3 (-): geoffrey perkins
• 2 (1): clocks go forward
  (Knocked off the top spot by – as you may have guessed by now…)
• 1 (-): matt smith

Despite an otherwise fairly quiet year, this blog’s biggest day of traffic ever followed the announcement that TV’s Matt Smith would succeed TV’s David Tennant and TV’s Doctor Who, largely powered by some surprisingly high Google rankings, reflecting how little had been written about the new Doctor in the past.

Same time next year then?