1/27/10 A Blogosphere Year

Well, I've been blogging for over two years, written hundreds of posts filling almost 700 single-spaced pages in hardcopy (according to my mom, who prints it out for my grandmother).

But a year ago today, I set up statistical tracking, with help from the computer whizzes at Google Analytics (and from my dad, my own go-to computer guru).

After 365 days of gathered data, I have some interesting-to-me-and-hopefully-to-you statistics and observations to share.

In the past year:

• I've received 10,320 visits from 4,752 people on 6 continents. (Where's the love, Antarctica?)
• 55% of you are returning visitors (thanks!), while 45% are one-timers,.
• 25% of you are loyal fans of innocentablogged, and come back to me of your own volition, time after time. Another quarter come referred from PeaceCorpsJournals (which has featured me on their homepage at least 3 times - thanks!), another quarter from Google, and the last quarter from a variety of sources, including my Facebook page, my college alumni blogsite, Ask.com, Yahoo.com, friends' blogs, peacecorpswiki.com, strangers' blogs...
  
• My single biggest day was May 27th, when, for no reason I can discern, 97 different people all decided that they really wanted to read about my life and work.
  
• My slowest day was August 5th, when just two folks wandered over to my blog.
• Originally, I averaged 9 visitors per day. After February, when I began posting information of general interest to prospective PCVs, though, my average jumped to an average of 24-25 visitors per day, largely because I've become one of Google's top destinations for people wondering about Peace Corps. I take this as a compliment from the fine folks at Google. :)
  
• I went through a noticeable slump in the summer - could it be that most of my readers are college students?? No, impossible... ;)
  
• My most popular page is simply the homepage, accounting for almost a third of all pageviews (almost 6000 out of the 19000 ever). After that, it's the information I wrote about the timeline for joining Peace Corps (over 2000 pageviews), and other applicant-friendly blogs (about 2800 pageviews, scattered among a dozen posts). Of my top 20 most popular posts, the only pages that aren't targeted at applicants are Moroccan Man-Touch, coming in at #6; Noora & Rachid's Wedding, at #12; a recipe for Pumpkin Spice Muffins, #14; my reaction to So-Youn's passing, #16; some of my favorite photos, #17; a cartoon mocking our poor hygiene, #19; and my experiences of Sexual Harassment in Morocco, at #20.
  

Where are y'all from?

• I've received 8,184 visits from the US, including all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico. Go Goal 3! :D
• Californians were my biggest fans, visiting 1,398 times
• North Dakota sent exactly 1 visitor. (It's only fair - that's the only state of the 50 that I've never been to.)
• Arizona was the unexpected second-biggest source of visits, with 929, nearly all from Tempe.
• That was followed by a near-three-way tie between New York, Virginia, and Louisiana, all sending about 550 visits.
• If I look city-by-city instead of state-by-state, I see that my two biggest fans are in Tempe, where one person visited my blog 813 times, and Shreveport, where two people visited my blog 519 times. (Care to step forward and identify yourselves, friends?)
• Here are my Top Ten Cities, looking at the worldwide city listing. Note that "Marrakech" is the hub *my* router goes through, so most of those hits are me, reading my own archives to refresh my memories or find links.
  

1.	Tempe	813
2.	Shreveport	519
3.	Washington	452
4.	Marrakech	366
5.	New York	275
6.	Palo Alto	217
7.	East Lansing	193
8.	San Francisco	175
9.	Houston	141
10.	Rabat	137