Perhaps I'm very late to the table, so to speak. I've been crazy busy lately with the move, of course, and overwhelmed much of the time, and basically blowing off steam just by writing. But Blogspot has added some features for those of us who post on it, and I'm just catching up.... gobsmacked! If you bear with me, I promise there's a surprise at the end.
For years now I've been noting how many readers hit the recent posts here. Some take a day to be noticed if I'm not posting regularly. Some get 5 right away, then sit static for a week, maybe picking up two more on a weekend. Yeah, OK, whatever. I still write for me, and you all are welcome to come along for the ride. It seemed like I have been talking to a very few family members or friends over the years. I as writer never know who the readers are, of course, any more than you readers can see how popular any particular post is... or isn't. I've been presuming "isn't."
After a while I dug a little further, looking at longer time scales, see what is still getting visited, or even just the surprise that some are actually still getting visited. One always stood out, and still brings a lot of people to the blog, my post on the Big Job's Daughter's Secret. It got 68 quick visits shortly after being posted. OK. Another time I noted it had a couple hundred. Hmmm. Interesting. Then it was over a thousand, and just kept growing. Right now it's over 13.7 thousand, and no indication that it's losing readers. Nothing else comes close, although there are some that have steady visits from new eyes, like How Many Bubbles In A Bar Of Soap? or How To Pack A Display Cabinet. Some are approaching a thousand hits individually, which I find gratifying. But when I located the all-time number of hits, I was bowled over by 263K (!), with the largest portion of those by far in the last year. The graphs Blogspot has put together are very skewed to the far recent end, so something recently kicked up a bunch of interest. This post will make 1704 on this site. So people come for some particular thing, apparently, and then check around to see what else is here. So...
While scouting what's getting attention, I noted that Blogspot made it much easier to scroll down through pages of titles, recent to further in time, which also gave number of hits. Many that I thought fell into an abyss after, say, 7 views, were now sitting over 50 a couple months later. And there are still a regular stream of them which just aren't all that interesting.
Blogspot gives other kinds of information, once you (finally!) happen to notice some red fine print in a corner saying "More about this blog". No clue how long it's been there, but some of the regular format recently changed, making it easy to conclude it all happened at the same time. No, it doesn't show to you, but when I'm writing I see it. New stuff is on the tool bar which I haven't tried out yet. But someday. Frankly, I'm still struggling with posting pictures. Blogspot apparently is fussy about how much text I put ahead of one and how much after, or it just won't load any. Eventually I'll figure out the "rules."
Is it cheating to pop some eye candy in to keep interest in boring stats?
Anyway, the first section of deep-dive statistics is about referrers. No surprise here, Google is top. The second is the title of the blog, so people must have bookmarked it and go directly there to see what's new. Heck, I have to in order to find it and it's mine! The list following that has some familiar names as well as new-to-me ones, ending with something called www.vampirestat.com. Seriously, folks? Am I supposed to think I'm attracting vampires now? Listen, all you alleged vampires out there: You are NOT welcomed in my house! I refuse to believe in you, just like I think zombies are incredibly silly and the "rules" governing them/you are ridiculously inconsistent. But in case you actually need an invitation to enter, you do not have one! So there! The last referrer on the list, and most popular of all, is "Other", at 245K. I'm kinda glad they quit listing individual ones at that point. What do you think: 287 pages of individual referrers to go through before reaching the next category? More? Yeah, forget it. I'd never get on to the next category of information.
Next comes top referring URLs. Apparently that's different from referrers, even though the top 4 items all are Google, just now printed with the www and a .com at the end. Once again, all of the "Other" ones vastly outnumber the total of all the others put together.
Getting bored yet? Just hang in there a bit longer please. The final category is what totally blew my mind. It does, however, come after Audience, by which they mean a list of browsers used, not who you all are. Then a list of top keywords searched... Yawnnnnnn......
Oh heck, let's just skip past the rest and get to the last bit: Where are you all from? Without seeing the map and graph, I'd have thought the answer would be the US. Yes, I know the internet is world wide, and there are English speakers/readers all over. But who else would be interested? This is the part that really gobsmacked me. The US is only number 2. Any guesses about number one? Any at all? Was Singapore on your list? Yes, SINGAPORE !!!!! And the list of countries is nowhere near ending there. In order, from 3rd highest, France, Hong Kong, Russia, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, United Kingdom, and finally, Other.
Just for fun, I clicked on Other and got a new list. I mean, why not? It won't get much crazier, will it? Add Canada, Ukraine, Romania, Poland, China, Japan, "Unknown Region" - had to be in there somewhere, right? An admission of ignorance when we think everything is known online... who knew? - United Arab Emirates, Portugal, Sweden, and not to be forgotten, Other. Yes, another "Other". If that final Other was a single country, it would have been way up on the list right after United States.
So "Hi," all you you scattered readers. Welcome! Have you met your neighbors yet? Are you as gobsmacked as I when I first read all that? I don't know about you all, but it's going to take me a bit to get used to all of you out there. I'm not sure what it takes to entertain you, but we'll see as we go, eh?
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