Wow! I hit the front page of Digg.com about 20 hours ago, for an old posting. The piece is one I wrote back in September about new features in Gmail only being available in the US English version.
With the new Chat feature now released I guess some people were searching to find out why they didn’t have it. They found me, and Digg user Gurgle dugg me.

Ironically, I didn’t find out about it until mid afternoon because GMail is being really slow at putting mail in my inbox. My statistics package mails me every 100 unique visitors. Around 1:30 this afternoon, I received over 50 of these emails all showing in GMail as having been sent “8 hours ago”. I looked and saw that most of them were around 5 minutes apart! I checked my stats package and saw the spike!
(click for larger view). You can see from the hourly chart that for the hour of 5am GMT I got over 1100 visitors!
The visitors bar chart for the month has yesterday sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb!
(click for larger image).
In all I had just over 10,000 unique visits yesterday: over 7 times the current average! I’m pleased to say the server held up well. Partly thanks, I’m sure, to Ricardo Galli’s WP-Cache plugin. My Webalizer stats are showing 17,000 visits for the domain as a whole yesterday (264,000 file hits), almost 3GB of bandwidth. My last hosting arrangement would have ground to a halt in less than 15 minutes!

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.