Seduced by stats

Stats for this past week

An unexpected little "zing" I get from doing this blog every day is checking on the statistics that Blogger maintains for me.

On the back end "admin" side of my blog, it shows me a few different things:

• the number of times my blog has been accessed per day, week, month and all-time
• how many views each individual post received per day/week/month/all-time, so maybe it's the title that might catch a reader's eye.
• information about who my audience is

• in what country they are reading it 

• what site they used to get to my blog (Facebook, an RSS feed like Feedly, other blogs, etc)

• which internet browser they are using (Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc) 

• what type of computer operating system they are using (Windows, Macintosh, iPad, iPhone, etc).  We used this last piece of information a few years back when I was doing webpages for our school and we realized how many people were accessing our site using mobile phones.  That showed us that we needed to also be making a mobile version of our website available to our parents/visitors or the information on the small phone screen is too small to see.

Make you nervous?  Sound like NSA is spying?   Maybe but every website you go to gives out that kind of analytics information. It's how they know what to try to sell you.  That didn't help, did it?

Here's how it looks for me:

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But the source of statistics that really caught my eye - literally - came from my blog mentor's sidebar.  I don't know if she realizes she is my mentor, but I found this Flag Counter widget on her site.

Of course her blog has been going for seven or eight years so she has LOTS of flags with thousands of visitors, but it's just so cool when a new state or country shows up.  Right now I have 16 states, 8 countries, and Norway just showed up as my "New Flag" this morning!  

It really doesn't take much to keep me entertained!