I used to think for a writer I was at least marginally tech savvy. After all I was hired as the managing editor of The Kingston Net-Times, a short-lived online local daily “newspaper” experiment of sorts, way back in November 1996. That makes me a so-called “early adopter” – doesn’t it? Maybe not so much. How do I know that? I wrote a soundingsjohnbarker (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) blog post on March 7 headlined “Tipping points and blogging by the numbers” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/tipping-points-and-blogging-by-the-numbers/) where I observed that “on an ordinary day, readers in about a dozen or more countries around the globe read what I have written here. The makeup of the countries changes somewhat but the overall number of 12 or slightly more on a daily basis, has been the same almost from the beginning. It doesn’t go up or down much.”
Well, here’s my mea culpa. It actually just appears stuck at 13. Why is that? The WordPress format I am using for my statistics page will only “display” 13 countries, as it has to find sufficient room to display other categories below “VIEWS BY COUNTRY.” The square box format on that area of the stats page makes that accommodation work across from the countries display (I’ve always loved their colour flags feature) in “TOP POSTS & PAGES” by offering “Other posts” when necessary at the bottom of that particular category. Not so for counties apparently. There is nothing called “Other countries.”
There are, of course, ways to drill deeper and mine such data within WordPress in other locations, off the main statistics page, showing such fascinating tidbits as “Most popular day and hour.” This is the “day and hour when you have been getting the most views on average. The best timing for publishing a post may be around this period.” Currently I get “21 % of my views” on Monday and “6% of my views come at 4 p.m.” on Monday, making that the “Most popular hour” for reading soundingsjohnbarker.
Happy Monday, then.
And thanks Lithuania for topping the leaderboard so far today! That honour usually goes to the United States or Canada (among some of my favourite countries to show up under VIEWS BY COUNTRY and cause me to wonder what their citizens or other residents might be reading on my blog – none of which are on today’s list so far today – are the Holy See, European Union, Israel and the Palestinian Territories). I was also quite popular in Romania for a couple of days late last week, but not so much today it seems.
There’s more, much more. But that’s too much like work and Google Analytics. And If had wanted to be a statistician instead of a writer, I’d have presumably exerted more effort in Sister Dorothy’s math class. Well, actually if I had exerted more effort, I wouldn’t have been in Sister Dorothy Schweitzer’s Grade 10 “general” math class in the first place. I’d have been in “advanced math.”
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