Statistics can be fun!

Today I discovered the "Stats" tab on my blogger dashboard.  I have no idea how long it's been there, but I'm glad it is!  It provides me information about my blog traffic such as referring sites (who found me from veganfoodrecipes.com?), countries where people have viewed it, browsers people use, and even the kind of operating system used (the PC people far outnumber Mac; I wonder if that reveals something about my politics).  You can view traffic right now, from all day today, all month, and all time.  There is no identifying information so I can't tell who exactly who is visiting my corner of the web.  I can't back-stalk anyone, but it is very interesting to see what kind of audience I'm reaching.  I'm surprised by which posts have had the most views, a little disappointed at the ones that only have a few.  But I won't feel bad because that probably has more to do with my marketing than my readership's loyalty.

My favorite information is seeing where people are at when they viewed my blog.  The countries with the most pageviews are listed.  Of course, by far the place most people view it from is the United States, but surprisingly (or maybe not) the second on the list is Brazil.  I had a brother and cousin serve missions in Brazil for our church so they probably pulled it up once in a while. Tied for third are Azerbaijan, Canada, and the United Kingdom.  The latter two are explainable-- I know of readers in each place-- but the former?  I had to Google it because I'd never heard of it before.  Who might have found me in Azerbaijan?  Must have turned up in a random web search.  To round out the list, fourth most popular is Russia trailed by Burundi, Latvia, Ukraine, and Denmark respectively.  As far flung as they may seem, I can actually guess who was viewing it in eastern Europe and Denmark, but I don't know anyone in Burundi.  Must have been other fluke hits.  I'm surprised Germany and Taiwan didn't make the list since I know I have/had readers in each.  I guess the system isn't perfect or comprehensive.  But it is certainly entertaining!

Greetings to my readers everywhere!  I'm always flattered when people want to read what I write.  Even if you have stumbled here by accident, thanks for visiting and feel free to stay a while.