Monday, May 03, 2010

Traffic Report - the blog stats for April

Yet another month with too little work to occupy me....


On Froogville there were 47 posts and 18,000 words.

On Barstool Blues there were 37 posts and getting on for 13,000 words.


Readership numbers on Froogville seem to be on the increase (although I don't know how much faith can be placed in these statistics, since most of the people I know who read the blogs do so via a feed, and I don't think these get counted), with over 2,000 visitors last month. However, a sizeable proportion of that increase came on April 8th (and on the day or so either side of it), where I had an exceptional spike of over 300 visitors in one day. I had wondered if this might have been down to my blog-friend JES very kindly linking to me (or more specifically to my posts on the subject of Chinglish) in this post, but Google Analytics says no. As far as I can determine (I'm not a big fan of Google Analytics, and haven't really taken the trouble to familiarise myself with all of its arcane complexities), there was no special reason for this phenomenon: the patterns of usage would appear to have been exactly the same as normal - except that I got four times my usual number of visitors that day. This is a mystery which merits further investigation.

2 comments:

JES said...

I've almost completely given up all attempts to figure out why RAMH's traffic goes up or down. I "monitor" it, after a fashion, using two tools -- sitemeter.com and statcounter.com -- but the ebb and flow seldom makes sense, except on those rare occasions when somebody with a relatively huge Web presence links to me.

(Last summer, a BBC correspondent in the US wrote a farewell column on his departure from the States; apparently, he'd wanted to cite Robert Frost's poem "An Importer," and found it at my site. I still get lots of visitors following the link from that column.)

If this were ancient Rome, circa 100 BCE, I'd probably tinker a few times with the entrails of some dead pigeons. And then, unable to make any sense of them, either, I'd just shrug and move on. (The blog name back then would have to be something like Running After the Hem of My Toga. The Romans didn't actually wear hats, did they? Vain buggers. Probably also spoiled by the Mediterranean clime.)

Froog said...

I believe the Greeks and Romans wore hats for practical purposes rather than fashion. They were wary of catching the sun if spending long periods out of doors, so you find references to "travelling hats" once in a while. The only person you commonly see depicted wearing one is the messenger god Hermes/Mercury - leather, wide-ish brim, something like a fedora.