Sunday, October 21, 2012

Blog Stats

I'm still twisting in the wind, trying to (a) figure out what features of the Old Blog I want to include in the New Blog, and (b) then figure out how to make it happen.

I already tried to put the hit-counter on; as you can see by looking in the right-hand sidebar, where it says

Hits since December, 2004

... they aren't displaying.

According to my stats counter account, this blog has registered 369,000 hits so far.   Compared to Kim De Tuit for example, who use to get that many hits in a single day, that's nothing.  But for me, it's encouraging that I'm not completely ignored even if my blogging has been haphazard over the past couple of years.

Well, I've been distracted.

All I know at the moment is that for the first week of October, 2012, I had 15 unique hits.   But for the month so far, there were 800 hits.  Somehow, I think that the next 300,000 hits are going to be very slow in coming, because I have lost most of my usual readership.

Most of the hits I'm receiving are because people the world over are being directed to my website when they search GOOGLE for subjects which I have addressed in articles going back for years.  Most of them are related to IPSC/USPSA, or firearms/ammunition/reloading/competition in general.

VOLUME?
Also, I'm reminded because this blog came about after I had been 'blogging' on The Unofficial IPSC List, which now posts even less frequently than I do.  You see, I have been known to Have An Opinion, which I often expressed in great length.  My dear friend Bumstead once commented about a 3,000 word post I submitted, and a few other contributors gently suggested that I was using too much "bandwidth".  That is a misnomer, but I did get the point.

Thus I started Cogito Ergo Geek on December 4, 2004, and after almost eight years I'm still struggling to intersperse opinion articles with a few items which people might actually find interesting.

What I find interesting is that, going back to my email archive, I find I've saved 1,301 articles (this will make 1,302) and all told they consume a mere 15 MB of storage.  That includes embedded photos.

(the actual total number of articles is larger ... considerably; see below)

Oh the other hand, I've got text-versions (or html text) of 500-page books which only occupy 25kb.  I'm not sure how they compare to my Blog entry, but the html version of "Clean Your Gun Regularly" consumes 8kb.

But how many articles have I actually WRITTEN?  Including those which never made it past the "DRAFT" stage?         3,298

Published?  1,907

Over the past eight years, I've averaged about 240 published posts a year, or 20 a month.

The biggest year was 2007,  with over 400 posts.

...

Incidentally , my computer died and self-rebooted while I was writing this article  It restarted without problems, and I did send an error report to Microsoft, but I don't have any idea what happened.  Another problem is that my sidebar (which so far only consists of my archive links) doesn't always display.

One of the reasons I didn't convert to New Blogger earlier was because I was trying to avoid post-development glitches in the software.  I didn't expect them to have all been sorted out by the conversion deadline,  but I think those are two serious problems which one would HOPE that Google will manage to successfully address Real Soon Now.

While we're waiting, I wish to add that I am grateful to those die-hards amongst you who have continued to stop by with some frequency during The Lean Years.  Your very presence has encouraged me to get back into the normal routines which I had all but abandoned while Life Happened.  I promise to work harder at finding pleasure in my old once-comfortable habits.


1 comment:

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