It still looks a lot like winter up here in Wisconsin. But, spring should be arriving in the next couple of weeks. While there are still a few of you (about 150 a day) making regular stops here I thought I would let you know some statistics for the season. Just so you all know how much good your posts do. Because even though it was fairly quiet, there are a lot of lurkers here. People who come to read but never post.

75% of my visitors to this site are new people. On average they visit about three pages here on the forum during their visit. This past season, from November 1st to today, we have had 27,356 unique visitors. There were 8,479 repeat visitors that came back on an average of 4 times during the season. In total, viewing 93,446 forum pages. 89% of those people come from the U.S. and 6% from Canada, 1% from France, 1% from England. The Canadians didn't amount to as big of percentage but they read about 3x as many pages as the U.S. visitors when they did stop in.

As far as the states, New York state was the winner with almost a thousand more visitors than second place. Then, it is near a three way tie for second with Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

No surprise google was the big winner for bringing in those visitors. But 6,324 new visitors came in direct. That means someone sent them an email, or told them the address and they typed it into their browser. I think that's really great. After that, Yahoo, Bing and Hearth.com were who sent us the most referrals.

A little less than half of you are using Internet Explorer, a comfortable second place is Safari again a near tie, Chrome & Firefox are within 20 visitors of one another. Android had almost 10x as many hits as iPhone. The iPad had twice as many hits as iPhone.

I bought two new servers this year and as soon as spring actually hits, I will be moving the web site onto those new servers and giving a bit of a software upgrade. Nothing should be lost. Most people won't even notice the difference.

Hope you all had a good heating season!

I have had someone report they are having troubles with the forum. If they try to post for instance they get:

The page isn't redirecting properly

Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.

If you are having a similar problem or have seen this error and fixed it, please PM me.

--ja

Anyone having trouble with the forum ever since I changed back from the Christmas theme? If you are, send me a private message if you can't post here.

Hoping you and yours have a very merry Christmas this year. That those stoves keep you nice and toasty warm and you are with the ones you love!

--ja

I can tell it is getting colder out without ever stepping outside my door. I can tell it is getting colder because suddenly every other day we are getting a new member here. Up from about one a week during the warm months.

Welcome new members! It is going to be time to light those first fires before you know it.