Traffic Report - the blog stats for August

August was - almost always is - a relatively 'slow' month on the blogs, because of holidays. The really scary thing about this month's stats is that around two-thirds of these posts (and a few from the end of July as well) were composed in a frantic two-day spell, as I 'pre-blogged' the month in anticipation of leaving on my travels (I had hoped/expected to get away for nearly four straight weeks, but as things turned out, I managed barely two weeks, with a brief, shamefaced, reclusive return to Beijing sandwiched between them). Anyway...

There were 32 posts and around 9,000 words* on Froogville last month.

There were 28 posts and 7,000 words on Barstool Blues.

I am intrigued to discover from Statcounter that I recently had a visitor to Froogville from Rio de Janeiro. He/she found this obscurely punning little post via a Google image search for 'one thing after another' (???), and stayed for nearly 10 minutes. (I can't replicate that result now, but it does turn up some unusual stuff!) It's a funny old world, right enough. Someone in Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory, also found me via a search, but left in a dissatisfied huff after 3 seconds. There's no accounting for taste.

And, by the by, we are approaching the 5th Anniversaries of both blogs: September 8th for Froogville and September 16th for Round-The-World Barstool Blues. What high-jinks shall I contrive to commemorate this landmark? Oh, probably NOTHING. Wait and see.

*  I have long been concerned that my method of tallying the verbiage on the blogs (cutting & pasting the month's posts into a Word document so as to use the Wordcount feature in that; slightly ponderous) tends to boost the total by including all the stuff in the header and the footer; hence, I have usually rounded down, and said approximately a lot. In the last year or so, there has been a proliferation of features in the footer to each post - a 'Share on Facebook' option, and other such dross. Most of these appear on the blog as an icon, but when cut & pasted into Word are expanded to an explanatory phrase; and I find that this now means the footer typically contains nearly 30 words for each post. So, I've had to take to knocking a full 1,000 or so words off the apparent total. Reported wordcounts in the past may have been slightly overstated.