Blog Statistics

A few weeks ago Al asked me why my blog got more visits than his.  I didn't now how to respond to that but later I figured out that a blog about a circumnavigation would have an advantage over one about a more localized cruise.  Anyway, I got curious and today I snooped around and gathered some statistics.

Any visitor to this blog can see all sorts of statistics by scrolling down to the bottom and clicking on "site meter", a very informative facility that Stephen installed on 2 Nov 2008.

My first posting on this blog is dated 25 December 2006, in which I described the specifications and equipment of Pachuca.  Since then there have been 1072 postings.  

There have been 37,058 visits to the blog, including the 4,425 that were made before we started running the site meter. This is alleged to represent an average 54 visits per day.  The average length per visit is stated as "1:41" which must represent minutes and seconds rather than hours and minutes.  The last 100 visits came from USA, Canada, Australia, UK, Scandinavia, India, and China.  I have occasionally seen Africa on the list.

My initial motivation for the blog was very modest: to provide an efficient means of letting a few friends and relatives know what I was up to without my having to repeat the same thing over and over again.  But unexpectedly I got into a virtuous cycle of increasing interest out there and increasing motivation in here.

And there have been personal benefits.  I like the discipline of sorting things out in my head so that I can express them - kind of brings structure and clarity to the head.  And the documentation is invaluable, both for analysing problems and for vivid trips down memory lane.

So there we are, the confessions of a blogger.