Stats

So these are my stats for the past 12 weeks. I think it shows a moderate rise in visitors until the Christmas to New Year lull but things seem to be picking up more now with an all time record in week two of 161 page loads (ahem, not to be confused with 161 visitors mind). It’s difficult to tell though whether I am getting more hits as none of the indicators of page loads, unique visitors or returning visitors are entirely reliable for various reasons.

It seems that as the amount of content, and particularly outgoing links, on Nick101 increases so do the number of hits I receive. About 8% of recent visits have been from unreciprocated or unknown links. Thus far I have had viewers from the USA, India, Singapore, Kuwait, New Zealand, Belgium (ok that was me on holiday), Portugal and Spain amoungst others as well as my predominantly UK based readership.

Translating this into content; when I started this blog my initial concern was with actually being able to produce stuff to post. However as time went on I became much more relaxed about it as I realised I could come up with quite a lot. Of course now I have hit another worry point as my viewer stats rise; trying to deliver posts of reasonable quality (not sure whether I am doing that at the moment) and hanging on to viewers and chasing the somewhat unexpected goal of getting more hits.

One of the worst aspects is that it can be quite demoralising to put up what I think is a good post and get very few hits that day. I really liked Urban Jungle, featuring PARK(ing) and the cups in wire fence thing which I really thought was fun and interesting, but that day I got virtually no visits at all (seriously it was like the internet had broken that day) and hence Free Music Stuff the following day was a somewhat half hearted affair that ironically got twice the number of visits on the day it was posted.

Of course, this comparison between posts and hits is somewhat academic as I have no doubt that people will read the blog as and when it fits their schedule rather than based on the content of posts which of course you don’t find out until you read the post in the first place. Moreover, just because you visited the blog, doesn’t mean you read it but the stats don’t count that.