One pleasant bonus feature at WordPress.com is the “annual report” the site automatically provides, complete with the celebratory artwork you see below. It provides a good overview of your blog’s overall traffic, what sites sent visitors to it and what posts got the most attention–along with a corny fireworks animation and a fillip of promotion for my host. (Note to WordPress.com management: I don’t mind that. In other news, please approve my WordAds application.)

But this highlights reel glosses over many interesting wrinkles, and in my case it’s also skewed by the flood of traffic I got for announcing my departure from the Post here. So some other noteworthy details follow.

Of the 75,000-odd views this blog got last year, almost 15,000 went to that “Departure” post–but more than twice as many went to its home page. The third-most popular post was my rant about stupid social-media policies in news organizations, at almost 2,500, followed closely by the about-me page. After that came my introduction of my NASA Tweetup trip (featured on the WordPress.com home page, it clocked almost 1,700 views) and a how-to about forwarding mail from Lotus Notes to Gmail (featured nowhere, but regular queries for help on that topic drove it to about 1,300 views).

Note that I’m not using exact figures because I forgot to write down these numbers on Dec. 31, and WordPress.com doesn’t include a “last year” reporting option.

My biggest source of traffic was Twitter, at almost 3,800 views, followed by Facebook (close to 2,500), the Post (near 1,800), and “search engines” (Google, with traffic from Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com and other sites amounting to kopeks on the dollar). The most notable outlier in the top 10 was the local media-news site DCRTV.com, which accounted for about 500 views.

Speaking of search engines, the search queries that led people here were topped by–duh–my name, accounting for close to 3,000 page views. Farther down the list, I counted at least 20 misspellings of my last name. It’s okay: That’s the tradeoff for having a moniker distinctive enough to guarantee that you can get the same first-name-last-name user ID at most sites.

Of all the links you clicked on, the most popular (almost 800 clicks) was a column by Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton about the paper’s redesigned-but-still-sluggish site, followed by the panoramic photo of my old cubicle and my Twitter account (each just over 300).

The annual report offers a few details I don’t see on my usual stats page, such as the percentages of visitors from other countries. Sadly, I am not big in Japan, but I do seem to have a few readers in the U.K. I’d love to get a complete breakdown (hint: Facebook provides those analytics for public pages), along with software trivia like the operating systems and browsers used by visitors. Maybe next year? Until then: Thanks for reading.