Stats

I’ve admitted before that I do pay attention to my stats.  That’s partly because I would like the blog to be respectable among it’s community, but also, I’m a stats guy.  I love numbers.  At the beginning of this year, I started a spreadsheet and kept track of stuff.  How many times I ate out and where.  How many movies and sporting events I watched and attended.  How many times I traveled and to where.  I was even keeping track of how much money I spent on cards and where.  Why?  I love stats.  Do I still keep this list?  No, I stopped a long time ago.  One day I just shook my head and said, that’s just stupid.  It served no purpose.  Although, now it would make great blog material.  But you see where this is heading, don’t you?  No, well I will tell you.

I spent a few hours Friday night and a few hours Sunday morning going through all my blog posts and counting each word I typed.  Every, Single, Word.  I’m kidding, I didn’t count every word.  I just copied each post over to my Window Writer and it gave me a word count at the bottom of the page.  But I did that for all 228 posts.

I also counted how many pictures I used in that post.  Whatever picture or video it was, got counted.  Even logos and such.  So let’s take a journey down memory lane.  This will be a long post, but I plan on doing this periodically in the future just to catch up so those won’t be nearly as long.

There is where I stand currently.  As you can see, I’m closing in on 10,000 pageviews.  But that’s not why we are here, is it.

I started this blog officially on 2/22/11 but it didn’t become what it is now for awhile.  I used it more trying to get followers so I posted humor mixed with personal stuff.  You can see here that I had 5 posts that didn’t even have 100 words in it, including 1 post that didn’t have any.  Those were mostly funny picture or toons.  I debated on deleting all this nonsense since it isn’t what this blog is now, but it shows the blogs growth.  All that stuff I did to get followers, didn’t work.  Eventually I would realize this and blog for myself and when I did that, I gained more of the followers.  Despite that being the reason I blog now, it is still nice to know that someone cares what I’m typing.

12 posts – 1720 words – 12 pictures =

• average of 143 words per post.
• average of 1 picture per post.

Told you I love stats.  You see that last post, I used to keep track of every TV show and movie that I watched and did a weekly post.  That didn’t last long though.

Through the 2nd month of existence, I’m still posting fairly regularly.  This month I actually have my first 2 posts over 500 words and they both exceeded 1000.  You can see the posts with the word book in them.  I used to do book reviews of the book I was finishing and touch on the next one.  Those didn’t last real long either because I realized when I expected to put out something, it wasn’t much fun.  It was like having a deadline over me and I just didn’t enjoy those.  This is the main thing that I learned the first year or so of this blog.  I still have “features” such as Flashback Fridays, Cousins and What the Hell Are You Watching as well as smaller features that I include in other posts as WTF Did They Just Say?, WTF Were They Thinking?, Track of the Day and Insane in the Membrane.  But I do those when I feel like, they aren’t set to do on a weekly basis and that works better for me.

15 posts – 3898 words – 35 pictures

• average of 260 words per post.
• average of 2 pictures per post.

Here again you see 6 posts with less than 100 words and half of those have no words.  Definitely not making blogging history here.

The first 2 posts are titled exactly the same.  I actually went back to make sure I didn’t accidently duplicate the title doing the spreadsheet and I didn’t.  I have 2 posts over 500 words and only 1 under 100 so I’m getting better.  You will also notice there are less posts this month but also less pictures than any month.  That could be a good thing into growing this blog.

9 posts – 2821 words – 10 pictures

• average of 313 words per post.
• average of 1 picture per post.

There is still a humor post with very few words and a book post, but you see the TV & Movie guide is gone.  The post called I need an intervention is about my love for baseball cards.  And soon you’ll see where that effects this blog.  It already has some but it’ll get more noticeable.

Do you see it?  It looks like a lot of posts, but if you look at the dates, you’ll see this is 3 months worth, with 4 posts each.  What happened?  Well, on March 29, 2011 I started another blog (My Sports Obsession) about my baseball cards and sports in general.  I started giving a lot more love to that blog.  That blog got a lot more love than this blog, it was easy to get more followers because it was a topic specific blog.  I think I was sitting on 3 followers on this blog at this point.  So needless to say, I spent more time over there.  That was one of those lessons I learned too, but I hadn’t learned it yet so I’ll wait until I learn it to tell you what it is.

May – 4 posts – 1768 words – 50 pictures

• average of 442 words per post.
• average of 13 pictures per post.

The reason the picture count is so much higher is that 37 pictures in the post Cantigny.  Cheri and I went there and took a bunch of pictures so they are all personal photos.  But you see my words per post starting to climb.  The post Cantigny put me at 2 milestones as well.  10,000 words and 100 pictures.

June – 4 posts – 2194 words – 8 pictures

• average of 549 words per post.
• average of 2 pictures per post.

Picture average is better but they were all in a humor post.  My average words per post continues to climb.  Guess that happens when you only post 4 times in a month.

July – 4 posts – 2477 words – 17 pictures

• average of 619 words per post.
• average of 4 pictures per post.

Again the words per posts goes up but that’s partly because of one post where I talk about being a caregiver to a MS patient that has over 1000 words.  The pictures are up again but 7 were personal and 10 humor related.

 

I’ll stop there for now and continue this in 2 other posts.  This post is getting pretty long (1242 words).  I had more to say about the stats then I thought I would.  Don’t worry I’ll space them out so I don’t chase you away with 3 majorly boring posts in a row.