Wednesday, July 31, 2013

CHECKING THE STATS

This post, I frankly admit, was prompted by this post today by The Chubby Chatterbox.  Go ahead, click the link, read his post, then come back for the rest of mine.

I discovered that I began this blogging adventure on Halloween in 2008 with this post.  Fortunately that scary pirate did NOT succeed in becoming president.

This, I learned by checking my stats, is my 1,418th blog post.  But there were more, now lost to history.  I had blogged before, grew disenchanted and dumped all I had written.  They may be recoverable somewhere but right now I don't have the patience to search for them.  I find it amazing that I have written 1,417 posts prior to this.  What on earth can a person find to babble on about that much?  Of course, some posts contain only a video or a cartoon but most of them have some words flowing like a muddy river from my brain and fingertips.

As for this mutation of my blog, I discovered today that it has had 81,646 page views.  More than 50,000 of them came from readers in the United States.  Next was Germany followed by Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, South Korea, the Netherlands, Australia and the Ukraine. Since I write only sparingly (a few words at a time) in other languages I must assume that those readers are English speakers.  (Given, of course, the old saw about the U.S. and the U.K. being two countries separated by a common language.)

Well, now, what interests these people, I wondered.  I learned that my most popular post was one called simply "LBJ", about the late President Lyndon Johnson, in June of last year.  It was a fairly short post with nothing really pithy in it but to date it has had 325 page views.  The second-most popular was titled "JACKIE", and I can suspect that many of the viewers of it may have been drawn thinking it was about Jacqueline Kennedy, given my occasional penchant for political punditry.  (The three P's.)  But in fact it was about Jackie Robinson and was not political at all.

So perhaps some people come by mistake.  Some stay, some leave never to return.  While I was researching this post I noticed several names in the comments section that have disappeared.  I've lost track of many of them. One, the legendary Granny J, passed from our midst in May of 2010, leaving a great hole in this world of blogdom, or bloggery, or whatever.

Of so many others I guess their disappearances are just the way of the Internet.  Some have gone on to other universes . . Twitter, Facebook, et al.  Somehow I miss them all.

10 comments:

  1. I haven't read them all, but have read many. Keep them coming.
    They are appreciated.

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  2. New Zealand doesn't even rate a mention? COME ON!!

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    1. Bricky, the stats only give the top ten countries for page views. I can't imaging the Ukraine has more than lovely New Zealand.

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  3. 1418 posts? That's a remarkable achievement. Congratulations on all those visits for your Jackie post. It's strange how some pieces garner more attention than others. I never know which ones will be popular and I'm often surprised. Thanks for the kind words on my site today. You were one of those people I was referring to as a friend.

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  4. All I know is you make this old Texan smile when he visits here. :)

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  5. I followed the old blog and was happy when you returned. I miss Granny J also.

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  6. I miss Granny J so much. What an inspiration she was.

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  7. I do miss Granny J also. But her blog is still there and sometimes I go back and look at the old posts.
    I don't comment as much but still look at your blog every day, I think they call us 'lurkers' or is it 'stalkers', I don't remember.

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    1. Judy, it is "lurkers". "Stalkers" are an entirely different kettle of fish! :)

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