Your figures are different from mine but the trend is the same. I'm showing the current 7 day moving average right at 1k posts per day with a high mark of 1281 in late March. I use a 7DMA so it blends the relatively slow weekend into it with the fewest meaningless dips and spikes.
On the flip side, we got yet another record number of page views yesterday (and this excludes the considerable traffic I and others are making in the csstest directory -- some folks, myself included, are in the habit of using the site solely from there) and the average is definitely trending higher. Pretty strongly. That's more meaningful where Alexa is concerned. Once I put the latest CSS stuff into production, clear that directory, and redirect folks back to the production directory, there will be another spike.
This points out something that intrigues me, though.
I used to think the hit/post ratio was pretty stable. It's not. According to my figures, average hits per day have climbed about 20% in the past 30 days while posts per day have dropped about 20%. I'm somewhat curious why that is.
Any ideas? It seems counter-intuitive to me. Posting activity dropping this time of year is normal and predictable (end of January effect, nicer weather) and bear markets always have a depressing effect on posting. The drop in posting volume makes lots of sense and doesn't bother me. Actually, it should be a larger drop, but we're still in a stage of stronger growth than a more mature (age-wise) site would be.
The increase in hits is the part that puzzles me. Why are more people reading if fewer people are posting and there are also fewer new posts to read? And at a time when hits should be dropping (if you assume they should follow the same trend as posts)?
There are probably a bunch of possible reasons, all of which would be difficult to identify.
Getting back to the Alexa thing, I haven't charted it, but my WAG is that we'll be ranked in the top 20k by the end of June. Might be a good idea for a WAG contest. If I had to submit a guess without benefit of charting it, I'd take 19,438.
We're getting into territory where gains in ranking are tougher to get because we're grouped with a lot of pretty busy sites. Where an increase of 10k hits per day might've moved us up 20% or so in the rankings when we were ranked in the 80k range, now we're at a level where 10k is far less meaningful and might just move us up a few points.
The rate of ascent (in Alexa ranking) has already slowed pretty dramatically though we're continuing to set daily hit records.
AI
