On April 6, 2002, the first article was posted to Dean's World. It wasn't bad, in retrospect. But that makes our first blogiversary Sunday. I'll probably post something gushy that day.

But now, it's time for the monthly ritual: how's Dean's World doing? Those with no interest in hearing about the site's traffic can skip this message completely and move on to more interesting materials.

March was our best month ever, which surprises me, although I think both Chris Muir and the Iraqi Democracy project had something to do with that.

Traffic patterns since June, when we moved onto the current server, have looked like this:

We had a total of 57,518 visits in February, with an average of 1,855 per day. If you prefer to look at page views, we had 121,844. If you prefer hits, we had 294,807. I expect those averages to go down a bit in April, but that's what I said last month about March.

The Myelin Blogging Ecosystem ranks us as the 197th most popular blog out of a pool of 26,661 blogs. Meanwhile, Blogstreet lists us as the 284th most popular blog, out of a pool of 111,767. I expected both of those rankings to go down in March, but relatively speaking they didn't much change.

As a cure for excessive ego inflation, Alexa lists us as the 124,518th most popular site on the web, which means that there are only 124,517 places people prefer to visit! Also in the ego-normalization department, our traffic is not even 1% of that of folks like Glenn Reynolds are able to generate.

A quick Google search on "dean" reveals that I am still more important than the governor of Vermont, but still rather less important than bicycles or guitar strings. But I am now more important than milk! I take this as further proof that I should seek the Democratic nomination in 2004. Will you support me?

Thank you all for coming by, whether it's an occasional visit or a regular thing. Thanks especially to those of you who take the time to leave comments, who give so much life to this place.