Views for a Muse

Despite having this blog for a little over six years I still haven’t really figured out what to do with it. I don’t want to self-publish any short stories on it and I don’t really have that much to talk about every day. Having said that, I’m open to suggestions on what to do with this place so if you have to one share please do.

I think one reason I like the blog is because of the WordPress’ stats page. Like baseball, which has a stat for everything and is a stat-freak’s dream, WordPress does really well with their stats. You can look at post views by day, by weeks, by months and years (for the record, the best year for this blog was 2012). You can look at the number of unique visitors (by the way, how do you catch a unique visitor? Unique up on them). And finally, they have something pretty cool called “Insights” which shows you your blog’s most popular day (Tuesday for this one) and time (5:00 p.m. = 8%).

The most popular post on this blog is one I wrote on November 28, 2011 about Costco’s Take and Bake pizza which, by the way, was one of the worst pizzas I’ve ever eaten. In the last three and a half years that post has been viewed 15,423 times. I know there are blogs that get 10 times the number of views in one day but I’m not one of those blogs and that number of views seems pretty amazing to me. After the Costco pizza post the next three posts with the highest number of views are one about Cheer detergent’s new packaging (3,998), a rant about an evil genius inventing a weather machine (2,777) and a Poem of the Day (1,186).

One final statistic is that Akismet, a WordPress add-on that blocks spam, has blocked 43,830 replies on my blog.

So what’s the takeaway? While baseball managers can use stats to make a better, more productive team, I’m guessing I can do the same by using my blog’s stats which tell me to write about both Costco and household products using different poetic forms while griping about the weather. And to do it on Tuesday afternoons.

If you’ve been one of the visitors to this place over the last six years – thank you!