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| July 4, day one of this year's Waterfront Blues Festival. |
A few weeks ago I celebrated the twentieth birthday of this blog. I wanted to add a few more statistics in that post, but I ran out of time, so I thought I'd squeeze them in here.
You'd think that with today being election day in the UK, and repercussions from the first U.S. presidential election debate all over my news and opinion feeds, I'd have something less self-focused to write about! However, I'm quite sure that you're as closely in touch with all those developments as you want to be, and don't need me to fill you in. I, on the other hand, have taken most of today off to enjoy day one of Portland's Waterfront Blues Festival. I'm too exhausted (happily so!) to think very deeply, so sharing some blog statistics seems a safe choice.
Since the current count started on June 30, 2010, I've had 1,758,175 visits. I'm pretty sure that 95% or more of those visits were accounted for by visitors landing as a result of a search that had little to do with my content. For example, five of the six most popular individual pages have the word "repost" in the title. How many hundreds or thousands of search engine users included the word "repost" in their searches and found ... me?
This list includes the twenty most popular posts for the whole history of my blog, by raw count. Probably some posts from before 2010 are undercounted here, but I still find the list interesting. Totals for the posts are in the third column, and the fifth column ("adjusted view count") divides those totals by the number of weeks that have passed since the count started on each post. This was my way of evening out the ranking, so the old posts don't have an unfair advantage.
The result, in that adjusted order, is in the table above. I'm using Chrome to edit and read this post, with data imported from a Google spreadsheet; I hope it works with your browser.
I should point out that two of these top twenty were not written by me; they're guest posts written by Judy Maurer: "Sitting in the Russian section," and "When fear is a gift."
This particular set of twenty higher-scoring posts touches on most of my favorite themes: faith, discipleship, and religious rhetoric; faith and politics; Russia, where I spent almost ten of those twenty years; and, finally, thoughts and stories about human relationships. (I'm still working on the grief that "just won't come.")
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| Stats by country since 2010. The last few lines are cut off (screenshot). |
One important theme that didn't show up on this list was the story of my sister Ellen. Last Sunday would have been her 69th birthday. I posted some photos on Facebook to remind the world that she was once among us, and added a link to this post I wrote when she (would have) turned 60.
OK, no more self-referential blog posts until the next worthwhile anniversary! See you again after the blues festival.
Hank Shreve played his harmonica this evening at Kim Field's Harmonica Blow-Off, an annual feature of our blues festival. Here's a relatively recent video of Hank and his band.
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