Sunday, May 29, 2016

"There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." ~Mark Twain

I don't know how accurate this supposed Mark Twain quote is, but it's a good concept to keep in mind when looking at the stats for this blog. They may mean something, nothing, anything. Nevertheless, I find them interesting. In the past I have opined about the all-time stats, but today I am going to present stats on the most pageviews of posts for the week and month as well as all-time (the latter not changing much if at all since last I visited this topic).

To start, here are the stats for the week. This graphic shows the top ten posts by number of pageviews.


I'm actually glad to see my post about Lowell's Stations of the Cross being at the top, although 64 pageviews is not very many in the scheme of things. I'm not seeing any patterns in terms of what gets pageviews, at least by title, except that "Kerouac" is in the title of 5 of the top 10. I'm not sure how much Google indexes this blog, or how (Note to self: Things to learn when I retire), and so I don't think about which words and phrases might view readership when I write a post. I'd like to think that including Edward Abbey's name in the title of the #7 post helped, as did mentioning Patti Smith in #8. Actually, the Abbey post was tied with the 4 posts ahead of it, and I have no idea how Google decides to list them (by the way, Google owns Blogger). It doesn't appear to be alphabetical or by date. Anyway, although it came in last, I was happy to see that my poem for my friend Richard's cat made the top ten list.

So much for weekly. How about the stats for the month? This graphic shows the top ten posts for the month by pageviews.


Many of the same entries from the weekly stats show up here, with the exception of "Hear what the media said about the Beats" replacing "A Poem for Mr. Pooh W. Bah." Sorry, Pooh!

Few surprises appear in the all-time stats -- we've basically seen this list before, just with different numbers. I notice that some pageview numbers are lower than in January, which makes no sense to me. Google, help me out here....


As we've already learned, people want to see Kristen Stewart's tits, read On the Road for free, know how to pronounce Cannes, learn about Kerouac's favorite word, read about the On the Road movie (3 entries), travel to Cuba (prescient, being from 2009), and know what my next tattoo might be (done). Oh, and, for some reason, read my weak effort at spontaneous prose (maybe "Dimetapp" has something to do with it).

Anyway, there you have it: a look at stats for this blog by week, month, and all-time. It's an easy way to get a post out for the week. Sorry it's not more enlightening or original. At least it's something.







1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Incredible story there. What occurred after? Take care!