The month of March was a good one for The First Casualty. On several occasions in the past, I’ve mentioned that the site has been growing pretty quickly from month to month, but I’ve never shared specific numbers. So just for fun, I decided to open the kimono a bit this time — if for no other reason than to use the phrase “open the kimono,” which I have always found both overwhelmingly creepy and hilarious.

As the above graph illustrates, there’s a clear upward trend from January through March. The bars representing pageviews and visitors align with the axis at left, and the line representing posts corresponds to the axis at right. So last month I published 50 posts (many of which were written by Victoria Kwan and Sam Lim) and had 3,722 pageviews from 2,656 visitors.

A brief explainer: although I’ve been posting at jaypinho.com since December 2010 (and at 50 Books for 2010 since January of that year: all of the posts from that blog are archived and searchable here), I didn’t start making it a regular thing until roughly the end of September last year. Previously, it had been a hit-or-miss affair. Now it’s more of a project. Anyway, the huge drop-off from December 2012 to January of this year is simply due to the fact that I was in mainland China for the first two-thirds of January and had extremely limited access to social media (including WordPress) during that time.

However, while the pageviews and visitors decreased that month since I was posting less, the proportion (pageviews per post, for example) actually increased from December to January. But it wasn’t until March that it really took off: we came within 107 pageviews of besting The First Casualty‘s record month of December 2012 (3,828 views), but with fewer than half the posts (106 last December, only 50 this March).

The point? You guys — whoever you are out there in the Internet mists, scouring cyberspace for SCOTUS analysis, media criticism, and Red Sox fandom alike — have been great. Even better, there are more of you now than before. So thank you. Lastly, please feel free to post comments liberally (by which I mean “as much as you’d like:” comments from all across the political spectrum are welcomed).

Thanks again, and keep reading!