Summarizing a year with statistics is a popular thing to do so here are a few from this site:
- 1 = Blog added.
- 1 = Forum deleted
- 8 = Oddment pages posted
- 9 = Road trips reported
- 21 = Weeks of regularly scheduled Sunday blog posts
- 31 = Total blog posts
- 69 = Days on the road
- 2058 = Pictures posted — 96 in the blog, 141 in Oddments, and 1821 in Road Trips
Perhaps conspicuous by their absence are numbers on visits and views and other activities by folks other than me. One reason is that I’m not particularly proud of them or anxious to reveal just how small this website’s reach really is. Another is that statistics for both the blog and the overall website are incomplete. The website is missing some days in November and at least one other period earlier in the year. The statistics package for the blog didn’t get installed until November although the blog itself was launched in August.
So now that I’ve explained why I don’t like to post viewer stats, here are some hidden in a paragraph for folks who bother to read outside the bullet list. For 2011, the entire website had 43,213 visits with 227,060 page views. The most popular page was the Oddment entry on Tadmor. Its 894 views are undoubtedly the direct result of someone (not me) putting a link to it in the Wikipedia article on ghost towns. The blog has had 685 total views. The book review of The Long Drive was the most popular entry with 123 visits. Ego makes me remind you that the blog numbers are from just two months.
The next to last documented road trip of the year was my 100th. I marked the occasion by making a clickable collage of the teaser images displayed randomly, one at a time, in the upper right corner of the site’s home page. A link to the collage now appears below the teaser image. I meant this as a one time thing when I created it but in the days since have thought about adding subsequent trips to it. Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t.
There was a big change in the stables in 2011. The first road trip documented on this site was at least partially prompted by the acquisition of a red Corvette convertible. Since then, though other vehicles have been used and the convertible became a coupe and turned blue, a Corvette has been my primary road trip vehicle. As 2010 ended, I made a purchase intended to provide me with a fifty year old car for the Lincoln Highway’s centennial in 2013. I brought the 1963 Valiant home on January 3. Before too long, the Pontiac Vibe was sold and, in April, the Corvette was replaced by a Subaru Forester. Capital ‘P’ practicality replaced capital ‘P’ performance. Of course, I sometimes miss that Performance and all around Pizzazz but the AWD Forester is capable of taking me places a Corvette never could like the unpaved Pony Express/Lincoln Highway route around Dugway, Utah, that I drove in June. And I once again have a red convertible.
First, Happy New Year! Now, about your lack of pride in what you consider to be the small reach of your site. I definitely get that, but when I’ve revealed my shame at the smallness of MY blog readership, I’ve been told by two different people that hit counters aren’t accurate because they don’t record hits that occur from certain sources. They said that one can count on approximately double the number shown on the hit counter. I have no idea if that’s true or whether those folks were just trying to make me feel better, but I’d like to pass that on to you in hopes that you will also face 2012 with a better feeling about your truly wonderful blogs/websites.
It appears that you have a head for statistics as do I, but you’re organized enough to actually record them, whereas compiling statistics is one of those “when I find the time” activities in my life. So I guess I’ll just have to enjoy yours for now.
Count me as one of your loyal readers who appreciates every paragraph and picture, and particularly your way with words.
I don’t doubt that they’re right. I know of a few “leaks” as well as the actual gaps that I mentioned but I suspect I had already adjusted my feelings to consider the recorded numbers as minimums. And the truth is I guess I’m neither proud nor ashamed of the numbers. They are what they are and a sincere compliment such as you’ve just given goes a long way toward making up for another zero or two at the end of a number.
Incidentally, I’m one of your loyal readers who I don’t think shows up in your statistics very often. I read the entries via RSS and typically only visit the blog to comment. I believe only those actual visits are counted plus I don’t even show up as a subscriber. I’m not trying to be sneaky. I do it for convenience. My own RSS feeds are all now “summaries” so that even RSS subscribers must visit the site to get “the rest of the story”. I do that, not for the purpose of counting visits, but to minimize the amount of data potentially “pushed” to a reader. I’m a bit old fashioned in that regard and still think in terms of slow connections since I still occasionally find myself on one.
So, thanks for the boost and I hope 2012 is even better for you than 2011.
What this blog needs is more Valiant pictures! Happy new year, Denny!
I’m with you on that. I believe there will be some more Valiant shop time later this month that should lead to pictures and I hope to actually get it involved in a road trip or two come spring.
I appreciate the comment and hope your year really rocks.
Doing some quick calculator work on your stats, you’re averaging about 600 page views a day. That’s really pretty good for what amounts to a niche site.
That’s good to hear. As I told Laurel, I’m “neither proud nor ashamed of the numbers” . It’s a hobby and, as you say, very much in a niche. But, of course, I can’t help wanting the numbers to grow — at least to the point just below where I have to start paying for more bandwidth.
Unless “it” goes viral, there won’t be many hits. But do you really want someone who goes from one viral “event” to another?
I do my blogs for me. Plus, I really like doing the research.
I sure will miss that ‘Vette, though.
Hope to be seeing you for the Doolittle’s Raiders Reunion and the LHA conference.
The closest I ever came to viral, and it wasn’t very close, was when I had an unobscured copy of Marilyn Monroe’s 1953 Playboy centerfold on the site. At the time, I was getting about 200 visits a day but over half of them were just for Marilyn. The picture probably shouldn’t have been there anyway because of copyright laws and I didn’t really want to become known as the web’s biggest source of the nude photo so I replaced the image with a dim copy obstructed by the text of an explanation. Within a few weeks, the visits per day dropped to less than a hundred.
The LHA conference is a definite and the Doolittle reunion is a very probable.