Tuesday 10 September 2013

Lies, damn lies and you know whats

Excuse a briefly self-indulgent, unnecessary, honestly I know it doesn't matter really sort of post, sort of about blogging.

Or look away now.  I've got another one brewing that I'll put up in a couple of hours so come back then.

But yes.  Statistics.

Now, I know they don't matter, and I know that my blog is, if not my baby (I've got four of those already, don't need another one), my own project; and if I'm proud of it - which mostly, sometimes, I am - and if it does what I need it to do (mostly lie there quietly and be ignored at the moment) then it's doing all it needs to do and being all it needs to be.

But really.

Two years ago I won a national blogging prize.  For most of the year before that, and all of the time from then until April this year, I was, according to the Tots100 (yes, it doesn't matter, I know, yadda yadda) I was between 100th and 50th "best" (?), "most popular" (?), "most statistically relevant" (?) (see, I don't even know what it means, so really, why do I care?) parenting blog in the country.

Since March (75th), I have dropped a grand total of 586 places.   Which is impressive in its own way really.

And while I honestly don't really care (or at least not enough actually to do anything about it), I am simultaneously reassured, cheered and utterly bemused by the fact that blogger tells me that last month 18,082 people visited my blog.

Hello, whoever you are...

Oh, and the impressive looking chap?  He's the Duke of Wellington.  He didn't care about statistics either.  And I found his picture (by Sir Thomas Lawrence, apparently) on wikipedia commons.

Turns out (I've just checked, 24 hours after posting this) that he cared so little for statistics that he didn't actually say it.  It may have been Mark Twain, it may have been Disraeli, it may have been someone else entirely.  But as no one knows and the good Duke is more handsome than either of the others (though Disraeli does share my birthday, and Mark Twain had an utterly brilliant 'tache) I'm leaving him up there.

7 comments:

  1. Ha! Bugger the stats. Actually, whilst I'm here, would you mind if I posted that lovely pic I have of us at the Borders Book Festival on the blog? Also, going to be at Lennoxlove...pls shout if you'll do the hang-out thing with me again?

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    1. Of course not. And I'd be delighted (can you get me Joanna again?!). Tell me when you're going to be there and I'll see if I can inveigle B into a spot of babysitting...

      Or bring the whole family and come and stay?

      Delete
  2. Despite trying to, I still don't understand how the different blog ranks work (and I'm not stupid either!). I've been trying to get back to basics on my blog, and that involves ignoring ranks.

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    1. Oh! So glad it's not me. I thought for a while it was twitter, but then the only time I did tweet - and got people to retweet - was the the first time I went plummeting down the rankings. Hey ho.

      Ignoring may be the way forward - but it's so nice when you go up!

      Delete
  3. Funny the blogger stats thing. I have to admit, being new to the whole blogging world that I spend an awful lot of time (not so much in the grand scheme of things) looking at the page views go up and down each day. I have to say that while the views on mine are a drop in the bucket, I was disappointed that the number was somewhat skewed by the fact that for the first little while it counted me as a viewer (apparently I had to tell it not to :) And that some of the stats are skewed by spam robots (really I don't get the whole point of spammers). So my already low number is actually much lower :)

    I do enjoy seeing where the non-spammers are reading from though.

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    1. Interesting - I had no idea about stats at all when I started. Was doing it entirely by comments.

      Now I have no idea about stats, but I care about them anyway.

      Hey ho.

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    2. I do think though that most of my 18,000 readers were probably battery operated. My normal figure's around 5,000 and I'm not sure I believe in all of them either.

      Delete

I know. I'm sorry. I hate these word recognition, are you a robot, guff things too, but having just got rid of a large number of ungrammatical and poorly spelt adverts for all sorts of things I don't want, and especially don't want on my blog, I'm hoping that this will mean that only lovely people, of the actually a person variety, will comment.

So please do. Comments are great...