EdinburghEye’s first birthday

I started this blog on 11th August 2011, with a matching Twitterfeed. I resolved at the end of December to start writing at least one blog post every day, and so far – with a couple of exceptions – I’ve kept to that. Under the fold, some statistics that will probably be of not much interest to anyone except myself.

My Twitter account went from 0 to 1022 followers in one year. This blog has 86 followers. I have made 15,867 tweets and I’m following 857 tweeple.

What I want to know is (roughly) how many people may be looking at each blog post in the past year: and to have a sensible way of understanding the numbers, so that when I come to look at them again next year, I’ll have a reasonable idea of whether’s it more, less, or about the same.

I’ve written 381 posts – not counting this one.

The total number of visits to this blog is 66,153: of those, 10,660 are visits to the Home page and 1,530 are visits to the About Me page. So that’s 12049 hits that just don’t count as far as “reading my blog” is concerned. The real figure is 53963.

I could get the mean average by dividing 53963 by 381. That gives me 141.6 – but there’s another factor. Five times in the last six months I’ve had “outliers” – blogposts that go off the scale in the number of hits they get very fast. These five outliers were in February, 2,911: in March, 1,757: in May, 4,595: and in June, two outliers: one 1,185, and the one that includes the busiest day my blog had in its first year: 5195. Subtract 15643 hits (the five outliers) from the total, and the mean average is just over 102.

The median average is the number of visits at the 191th post when the posts are sorted in order of hits. That’s 59.

The modal average was more complicated to calculate. To begin with, I listed all of the posts in decreasing order of hits, and then I looked at a screenful of each posts (that was 23, but it didn’t matter: a screenful just made it convenient) to find out which screenful had the lowest difference between the number of hits at the top of the screen and the number of hits at the bottom. That was the area in which I was going to find the mode average. I found that 29 posts had got between 55 and 65 hits.

From that, I figured out that 82 posts – that’s just over 21% of the total number – got between 45 and 75 hits. That’s my modal average for this year.

You’ll notice that while I moved through the lower range (350 posts) I did so in bands of 30 hits (or 35 to round up to 200) from 200 to 500 I went up in bands of 100 and then in a band of 500 hits and then “more than a thousand”:

37 posts got between 76-105 hits
37 posts got between 106-135 hits
23 posts got between 136-165 hits
20 posts got between 166-199 hits
21 posts got between 200-299 hits
10 posts got between 300-399 hits
5 posts got between 400-499 hits
5 posts got 500-1000 hits
7 posts got over 1000 hits

137 posts got under 45 hits (depressingly, some got 0). But that includes 16 out of the 17 Ed Elect posts I did for the local council elections that just list all of the candidates standing for each ward, 31 of the 33 posts I made before the end of December 2011, and (sad but true) 22 of the Constitution posts I made in July. These were all outliers at the bottom end of the scale and I decided not to count them for purposes of calculating the modal average for the year.

The other 68 posts that got less than 45 hits were in January (17), February (11), March (10), April (6), May (10), June (4), July (6), and in August – so far – 4.

The top 68 posts (again ignoring the outliers) range from 1002 to 151, and occur in December (2), January (13), February (8), March (10), April (9), May (11), June (8), July (7), and August (2). Of the 113 posts that people have looked at in the past 7 days, they seem to range fairly evenly across the months. (Though it’s true that Olympics has been a theme of this blog over the past couple of months and that could skew it: I’ll look again in more detail in October.)

The top five country views are the UK, the US, Ireland, Canada, and Australia. The top fifteen include: Germany, France, New Zealand, India, the Netherlands, Iceland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Italy.

There have been 766 comments, which should average at 2 comments per blog post – but doesn’t. Akismet has protected this blog from 6,132 spam comments. The 10 most-commented posts are: one in December (71 comments), one in January (20 comments), one in February (24 comments), one in March (25 comments), one in May (22 comments), four in June (18 comments), (29 comments), (37 comments), (63 comments), one in August (20 comments). Three posts about abortion (one of them a guest post), three posts about Scottish independence, three posts about inethical/appalling things the Tories are doing, and one post about school dinners and Argyll local council. (Plus one post which was both about Scottish independence and about inethical/appalling things the LibDems are doing.) Three of the posts were among the five outliers (though for the record one outlier post was actually two – for purposes of hit statistics I counted both the posts I wrote about school dinners/Argyll as one).

In 2011, the overall average hits per day was 6: Aug (9), Sept (4), Oct (2), Nov (4), and Dec (12).
In 2012:

January 130 hits per day (4037 total)
February 293 hpd (8486 total)
March 243 hpd (7544 total)
April 230 hpd (6908 total)
May 367 hpd (11391 total)
June 509 hpd (15259 total)
July 273 hpd (8464 total)
August 294 hpd (3255 total so far)

By month, 11th August 2011 to 11th August 2012

By week, week 2 in 2012 to week 32

Daily hits, from Saturday 14th July to Sunday 12th August