STATISTICS

Usually, I am not very interested in numbers because they are sort of boring.  Mom doesn't like numbers much either because they remind her of all the math classes she had to take in school when she was growing up.  Also there are lots of annoying numbers on things like bills and tax returns.

But guess what!  The BlogSpot website now has this thing you can click on called stats, which is short for statistics, and when I looked there, I found some really cool numbers.  And the reason the numbers are so cool is because they are all about my blog!  And by looking at these numbers, I learned some very surprising things.

First of all, I didn't used to think very many people even looked at my blog -- like maybe only 10 or 20 a day.  But I was totally shocked to find out that most days my blog is getting over 1,000 hits!  A "hit" is not as painful as it sounds.  It just means that somebody went to that page.  In the BlogSpot stats, they call it a "pageview" and not a hit, which I guess sounds less violent.  Anyway, just because somebody looked at your blog doesn't really mean they read what was there, even if you wrote something very clever and charming.  What might have actually happened was that the person opened the page and then said, "Yuck!" and went on to another page.

But it's still exciting to know that so many people are looking at my blog, even if they say "Yuck!" when they do this.  For example, as of yesterday at about 5:00 p.m., my blog had 1,146 pageviews for the day.  The numbers are always changing, so I will just have to tell you what they were at one particular time.  On Sunday, I got 1,216 total pageviews.  In December I got 25,484, and for all time I have had 70,392 hits.  But "all time" only means back to May, 2010, because I guess that is when they started counting.

Okay, well, another thing I learned from looking at the stats page is that some of my blog posts have been way more popular than others.  And here is a list of the most popular posts and the number of pageviews for each of them, as of 5:00 p.m. yesterday:

Leonbergers                         14,584
Catahoula Leopard Dogs       8,498
Cane Corsos                          6,326
Animal Hoarding                   5,509
Collyer Brothers                    3,435
Ear Cropping                         3,380
Chinese Crested                     2,111
Dogs Playing Poker                  944
Armadillos                                881
Bengal Tigers                           790

So what we can learn from this is that people really like reading about dog breeds, and especially about breeds that they probably don't know a lot about.  So maybe I will write about more strange dog breeds in the coming year.  Or maybe I won't.  I want to make my readers happy, but of course the main reason for having a blog is to make ME happy!  Hahahaha!

Anyway, here's one last interesting thing I learned from looking at the stats:  there are people from lots of different countries reading my blog, at least sometimes.  In the past year, the biggest number of pageviews was from people in the U.S. (41,910), and the second biggest number was from Canada (4,836).  The other countries after that are the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Australia, Sweden, France, Poland, India, and Russia.

Wow, do I feel special, or what?  I never knew that statistics could make me feel so popular, but they do, so now I like them lots better than I used to!