NaNoWriMo :: NaNoWriMo Blog

As an anthropology major, I never thought I'd spend as much time as I do thinking about web servers. But over the last 10 years of NaNoWriMo, I've become completely obsessed with the way traffic flows through our sites. Russ and I have named all of our servers after coffee-growing regions in Ethiopia (the birthplace of coffee), and I love each of them like my little, roboty children.

In October and November, before I get out of bed in the morning, I grab the laptop and check our Google Analytics stats from the previous day. (For those of you who have real lives, Google Analytics is just a complicated hit-counter that tells you interesting things about the people who come to your website.)

From three years of Analytics stats, I've learned that we have very stable traffic patterns, but they're kind of weird compared to other sites. Basically we're pretty slow through the summer and early fall. In October traffic builds in a nonchalant, nothing-to-see-here-folks kind of way until October 31. At which point everyone in the free world suddenly appears on our site.

I have no idea where they come from. But faced with the onslaught of so many writers, cheerleaders, and curious onlookers, our roboty children tend to scream and run for the hills. And every year, Russ patiently coaxes them back to work with balloons and ice cream.

By November 3, the Great Drop-Off has begun, as thousands of the saner members of the NaNoWriMo community realize they have more sensible things to do than write an entire book in a month. From there, it's a pretty gentle slope down to December 1.

And that's our stable, weird traffic pattern. Because I thought it might be marginally interesting to those of you who are also obsessed with web traffic, I made a snapshot of what last October looked like on the NaNoWriMo.org site, and another one comparing this October to last October. Note: This doesn't include the Young Writers Program site traffic, which exhibits similar weather patterns but on a less stormy scale.

First up: October 1, 2007 through November 1, 2007.

October 1-November 1, 2007

And then this is what the last 30 days have looked like for us. The blue line is this year's traffic. The green line is traffic from the same day in 2007. That huge, sad, dip on October 1, 2008, is when one of our favorite children, Lekempti, died. (We brought him back to life a day later.)

September 23, 2008-October 23, 2008

Given those percentage increases from 2007, I think we're going to see an absolutely crazy November 1 spike this year. Hold on to your hats, everyone!

Anyone else out there have strange site traffic patterns they'd be willing to share? Post a link in the comments!

Chris