Wow! My vis­itor count, which has been run­ning since April 2003, has just popped over 500,000. That’s half a mil­lion vis­it­ors to my little old web site! I can hardly believe it.

I’m see­ing over 40,000 unique vis­it­ors per month now. The daily aver­age is over 1300, with a notice­able dip at week­ends. Most of those vis­it­ors, 62%, are still using Inter­net Explorer, but an encour­aging 31% are using Moz­illa or Fire­fox in some form or another. On the OS front, 74% are on Win­dows XP, 9% on Win­dows 2000, with Mac OS X run­ning a poor third at 6.5%.

As I usu­ally do, I’ll point out that these are real vis­it­ors to all parts of this domain apart from the Gal­lery, which has a sep­ar­ate counter.

My page count, which counts any requests for blog pages includ­ing from web crawl­ers and bots, is quite close to 5 million.

My top two refer­rers are both Google (.com and .co.uk), with the third place con­vin­cingly held by the WordPress Codex. Google, in vari­ous geo­graphic fla­vours, holds 25 places in my top 50 refer­rers! Other search engines hold another 7 places. In terms of num­bers Google far out­ranks all other refer­rers in the top 50 — 130,000 versus 52,000.

Another inter­est­ing high rank­ing refer­rer is blogging.typepad.com, almost cer­tainly this list of WordPress themes, which, along with the third place appear­ance of the Codex, prob­ably the Codex Theme List, tells me that a lot of people are look­ing for 3 column WordPress themes.