Keep on Reading

Some of you reading my blog postings may have noticed the ‘counter’ which has recently been added to the page. This basically tells me how many ‘hits’ my site gets and other stats such as which countries the readers come from and less importantly, which browsers they use.

A few weeks ago, when I was struggling for subjects to write about and wasn’t feeling particularly inspired by anything (writer’s block?), I considered ‘shutting down’ the blog for a while but thought that before I did, I’d try and find just how many people actually read it, or at least visit the site.

I found a site-counter on the web but struggled for a couple of days trying to get the code onto my blog until Guy wandered past one night, saw me having problems and fixed it in about 30 seconds! Oh the confidence and abilities of youth!

That was about three weeks ago and since then you’ll see for yourselves that I’ve attracted some 700+ hits (not readers I hasten to add, just hits), approximately 200+ a week. But more fascinating than that is the country list of the visitors. Obviously the UK and France feature strongly, accounting for 75% of the hits, and then there’s a large percentage of readers (10%) who come into the ‘unknown’ category!

The US features, where I know I have at least a couple of readers in Allison and my mate Dave, as does Cyprus where J’s sister Cindy relieves the boredom of sitting in the sun each day by putting down her Pina Colada and visiting my blog. Thereafter the country list is quite interesting with readers from the following places having a look every now and again – Canada, Australia, Maylasia, Italy, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Hong Kong, Germany, Holland, the Lebanon and Estonia. And then there’s someone in St Vincent and the Grenadines who visits every now and again! I reckon Russia and Estonia are probably accounted for by my mate Ashley who works in Russia every couple of weeks and Tan, my neighbor who is working in Eastern Europe at the moment, but as to who the others are – I’ve no idea. I got a comment the other day which was in Chinese (I think it was Chinese) and maybe that was my Hong Kong reader – sorry whoever you are I couldn’t make out what you were saying. But I did click on your comment – and was taken to a Chinese sex site. Velly intelesting! For the geeks amongst you, as you would expect Internet Explorer is by far the most common browser used with 40% of the hits, followed by Safari (used by Apple devotees) on 32%. Firefox has a 24% following and there’s one ‘romantic’ still using Netscape Navigator – good on you whoever you are. So thank you one and all. After looking at my counter I was heartened and will continue writing rubbish every day with just the occasional foray into incisive ‘journalism’ when I feel particularly strongly about something – like the French! Keep reading – I love you all, I love you all!