The Question Remains…

Wish the views on my blog were like this!!!

Have you ever looked at something and thought, “Yeah, okay,” and then thought about it a lot and said, “Now, wait a minute”?   Here’s one for you:

I was checking my stats late last night early this morning and latched onto something that has only happened once before  and that one beat this one silly, however, this one has me more stumped.

My views for yesterday’s post were 188.  Now, for me, that’s overwhelmingly wonderful.  I have had a 150 and the record of 726, so this comes in 2nd.  So, as with the other one, I began looking to see why this happened.  Inquiring minds and all that…

Anyway, looking at my stats page, I noticed that the hugest (word?) “most huge” doesn’t sound better (lol), anyway, the largest portion of the views went to my home/archive page, which was 106.  The bulk of the rest was for Five Sentence Fiction and Friday Fictioneers, which makes sense to me.

What didn’t make sense was that, although it said 106 views went to my home/archive page, it stated I only had 54 visitors who gave the 106 views.  That makes no sense to me as it means that nearly everyone, on average, visited my home/archive page twice!  I may be dense, but that makes very little sense to me.

I can see why a few people might go to my home/archive page 2-3 times through error or doing something else and coming back, but that many?

I remember several other bloggers stating that they didn’t like the new stats page because of the views vs visitors calculations seeming off a bit.  I simply want to know because I wanted to see what I could do to up my views and that just didn’t help at all.

Well, I will finish with something(s) totally different.  The first is a new YouTube Evian commercial clip.  It has already gone viral with more than 38 million hits in this short amount of time.

I liked the rollerskating babies better.  It has over 68 million hits to date.

The second thing is a clip from the David Letterman show.  The gentleman being interviewed was a news anchor from Bismark, ND.  His first day on the job, the very first thing he said were two swear words (he didn’t know he was even on camera yet) and the place fired him.

I don’t think he should have been fired.  Do you? Big controversy right now.

Anyway, enjoy.  I love you all.

Namaste,

Scott

A Minotaur? Really?

What a View!!!

I sat down to write my post tonight (just a bit later than normal) and looked at my site stats.  I don’t do double-takes often (unless a beautiful woman is involved, I guess).  But, I staggered a bit and thought that WP was, perhaps, broken.  My view graph was nearly flat-lined for up until yesterday…then it was a mark almost to the top of the graph.  I scratched my little bald head and looked closer…yesterday’s graph showed 726 views for the day!  As my previous record was 150,  I still felt that WP might be messed up.

Now, I had to really begin digging.  I called up the full site stats and began an intensive trek into unknown territory.  Not like Star Trek, more like Watergate, but still…

I was realizing that “Friday Fictioneers” was the topic yesterday and I couldn’t believe it.  I mean, I have been in FF for quite some time and never got near that many views before.  I continued to peruse (love that word) the information and finally found out that yesterday there were two posts that received a total of over 600 views:

1) The Minotaur- Haiku and Poem  434 views

2) Three-mile Walk Starts Today    203  views

That’s a total of 637 – a little over my usual for a whole week!

Now, I have mentioned the Minotaur post before here: Something I Noticed

I wrote this poem as a part of http://www.fiverr.com a place to do things for people for $5.

I retained the rights to the poem / Haiku so I just reprinted them.  Anyway, I am not certain what kicked this into high gear yesterday, but … WOW!  Now, I know that a lot of you get those type of stats everyday and I am glad for that.  But this is a first for me and something that I never thought would happen…or not for a long time.

I do notice that I only had 59 “visitors” yesterday, for over 12 views per visitor, but I am not really sure what that means here either.

I also don’t know what a “Tag” follower is, but I have almost 1,000 now!  Something else different.  I see that the term “minotaur” was hit in the searches a huge amount yesterday.  I guess what I was curious about is why this happened yesterday.

However, after digging some more into the stats, I got a hint:  One of the search engine stats was for http://images.search.yahoo.com/ .  It was very high.  When I went there and typed “Minotaur” into the search parameters, my pic for the post was number 47. If you clicked on the pic, there was a link to my post!!!

Anyway, this was just a time to share strange and good news with some of my favorite people.  I wasn’t going to do this; I planned on … well, doesn’t matter; I will do it on another post.

Question:  What is your biggest view post?  Link to it in the comment section!

Namaste,

Scott

Wow! I can’t Believe it – Well, Almost…

No, probably not all of these, but, at least, part of them!

Sometime Sunday night to early Monday morning, I passed another milestone.  This one is very special to me because I have a hard time even believing it.  During that period of time, my blog has now been viewed by 102 countries!

When this blog began, I am not certain that I even knew there were over 100 countries.  I never thought I would have had at least 1 person from over 100 countries look at my lowly blog.  I have come to the realization that it is you who are responsible for this wonderful goal being met.

I know what had to have happened.  I watched as you viewed my posts.  I viewed your posts.  Then people who had viewed you viewed me.  Then people who were viewed by you viewed me.  Then the search parameters based on my blog posts and my tags kicked in.  Little by little a country was added here and another one added there.

There are, at the time of this post, 196 countries in the world according to about.com .  Many of these countries I had never heard of.  The full list of ones that have viewed me so far is below.  I decided I would post it when I went over 100.  I will try to get back to my story and its conclusion in the next few days.  At the moment, I would like to give a bit of information on one country I had never heard of:

Myanmar  – Now, actually, this is the second time I have read through and typed all of this.  Just as I went to hit “update” after typing in the entire report, my Internet company lost connection to me for about 3 hours.  We were having rain, but I did not think about the power to the net going out.  It did not seem that bad.  It, evidently, was not quite local as the company knew it was down and left that message for our zip code on their phone system.

Back to Myanmar.  Okay, it is the country of Burma, now called Republic of the Union of Myanmar, but some countries don’t like that, so they still say Burma.  I didn’t even pronounce it correctly.  I clicked on sound and it said, Mee-on-MAR.

It has a perimeter of about 1200 miles and a population of 60-61 million people spread out over 65,000 villages.  The two largest cities – Yangon and Mandalay have a combined population of just a little over 5.8 million.

It is very rich in resources, but quite poor, partially because a lot of countries have put economic sanctions on it (including the US) because the country has violated human rights so much.  These violations are in things like genocide, rape, child labor, and human trafficking, along with others.

It is a military state.  HIV/AIDS is fairly common throughout the country.  It is mainly Buddhist and Bamar culture.  It is a country of civil war and unrest; the people are treated poorly and a lot of things given out about the country may be false coming from the military regime.

The wiki entry for this small country was huge and well worth reading if you can make the time.  Simply click on the name at the beginning of this account.

The list of countries which have had at least one view of my blog is below.  I find it more than a little fascinating that Myanmar was one of them.  YouTube was just recently unbanned from the country’s view.

Namaste,

Scott

_____________ List ______________________________

Country Name

Albania

Algeria

Argentina

Armenia

Australia

Austria

Azerbaijan

Bahrain

Bangladesh

Belarus

Belgium

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Brazil

Bulgaria

Cambodia

Canada

Chile

Colombia

Costa Rica

Croatia

Czech Republic

Denmark

Dominican Republic

Ecuador

Egypt

El Salvador

Estonia

Finland

Former Yugoslav Republic

France

Germany

Ghana

Greece

Guam

Honduras

Hong Kong

Hungary

Iceland

India

Indonesia

Iraq

Ireland

Israel

Italy

Jamaica

Japan

Jordan

Kenya

Kuwait

Latvia

Lebanon

Lithuania

Malaysia

Malta

Mauritius

Mexico

Mongolia

Montenegro

Morocco

Myanmar

Netherlands

New Zealand

Nicaragua

Nigeria

Norway

Pakistan

Panama

Paraguay

Peru

Philippines

Poland

Portugal

Puerto Rico

Republic of Korea

Réunion

Romania

Russian Federation

Saudi Arabia

Serbia

Singapore

Slovakia

Slovinia

South Africa

Spain

Sri Lanka

Sweden

Switzerland

Taiwan

Thailand

Trinidad and Tobago

Tunisia

Turkey

Ukraine

United Arab Emirates

United Kingdom

United Republic of Tanzania

United States

Uruguay

Venezuela

Viet Nam

Virgin Islands

Yemen