I generated a stats page for the first year of this blog and have been perusing it with some interest, despite my well-founded reluctance to take website stats at face value. I have tried to exclude most spiders, robots and the like from the calculations.
During the first year, the number of pages accessed increased about tenfold. After Great Britain and the USA, the most hits have come from Japan, Australia, Canada and the Netherlands. Many other countries also feature; I can’t imagine what the readership in Togo and Belize made of all this, though as they only looked at one page each it doesn’t seem to have interested them much.
When it comes to readership in the UK, I can sometimes see particular acquaintances of mine showing up in the stats, identifiable by their IP address. Commercial ISPs of course don’t give much away, though there must be quite a local readership to judge (for example) from the comments that were posted in the Bath Abbey article. And I know from what people say to me in person that many people have read these pages without posting comment! I’d love to know who burns the midnight oil reading them at the library in the University of Dundee. I suspect it’s a spider; but if you are real, Dundee reader, I apologise!
The most popular article was the account of my audition for the Chantry Singers. There’s no obvious reason why, except that at one time this article was a popular target for spammers.
Apologies for the downtime last week (the power supply to the machine room was accidentally cut) and for the glitch which prevented anyone from posting a comment for a while. I should have realised something was up from the lack of spam attempts.