Once again, a routine running on a server somewhere in a WordPress.com data center generated a 2012 annual report for this blog. You can view that presentation by clicking on the fancy fireworks graphic below; after, I’ll share a few highlights from last year’s stats, including some that didn’t make it into this automated annual report.

Total views: 89,639, up from 74,636 last year–and with a notable spike in November and December, largely thanks to my second-biggest traffic source.

Busiest day: Nov. 11, with 5,511 views, most for my discussion of whether I should keep or return a Surface and an iPad mini. (which broke the prior record of 5,416 I set when I announced my exit from the Post on April 7 of last year)

Most popular posts: that Surface and iPad mini post, at 11,300 views and change; my perennially popular guide to forwarding Lotus Notes e-mail to Gmail, at 6,600 or so; a quick note about search results getting redirected elsewhere, roughly 5,400. (These and following numbers are necessarily vague, because WordPress.com doesn’t break them down by the last year, only by the last 365 days.)

Top referrers: “Search engines” counted for almost 20,000 clickthroughs, of which about 19,000 came from various Google sites, maybe 300 from Bing and even fewer from other search options; Jim Dalrymple and Peter Cohen’s Loop Insight added up to about 8,800 and gets most of the credit for the popularity of the Surface/iPad mini and strange-search-results posts, among a few others; Twitter and USA Today followed up with about 2,000 each, and Facebook was just under that threshold.

Top search terms: Beyond the obvious one of my name (not to mention about 10 misspellings thereof), this list is topped by two computer-troubleshooting topics: forwarding Notes to Gmail, and OS X’s occasionally runaway CalendarAgent process.

Intangibles: I’m glad I was able to stick to writing at least a post almost every week outside my weekly-roundup self-promotion–and that some of these shorter posts that I might have held off writing in 2011 flowed into paid writing elsewhere. But I’m also happy that the writing feels like it’s been coming faster and easier here.