Blog facts and figures...

Here are some tidbits regarding the blog:

1) I have decided to pay the $5 per month to see where the visitors to this site come from. In less than 30 days I have racked up visits from 50 countries and I love to check each day and see if there are new countries to add to the list. Who knows how many other countries would be on the list if I had access to this service from the time I started the blog last April.

2) Yesterday I had first time visits from Lebanon, Yemen and Brunei! If you had asked me to list the order in which countries would visit, I am pretty sure that I would have put Brunei last (with Yemen second from the bottom and Lebanon third from the bottom).

3) Still no hits from places like Russia and much of eastern Europe.

4) Traffic has increased greatly over the past few weeks. The site averaged 20 hits per day the first week of January, 30 per day the second week, and is at 36 per day so far this week.

5) Most traffic comes from within blogger.com, which means that other bloggers are checking out this site.

6) Google brings about 30% of the blog traffic. I can see what words were used to search Google that led them here. I can also check that search and see where my blog is listed in the search - sometimes it is the number one site listed.

7) Repeat visitors represent only about 25-30% of the hits to the blog. That surprises me as I thought most of the traffic would be repeats from family and friends with only a few others who would stumble upon it occassionally.

8) There are a few posts that are driving traffic to the blog. Here are some of the most referred:
* Our visit to the Vatican at Christmas caused a lot of people to find and visit this site. I assume that they would like to also visit the Vatican at Christmas and are looking for information.
* Posts on the falling dollar are a big generator of visitors.
* The recent posts on Starbucks coming to Prague have generated quite a few hits, mostly from Europe.
* My post on the bombing of my former office in Saudi Arabia in 1995 has brought several people to this site.
* The post on St. Mukulas, a Christmas tradition here in the Czech Republic, brought in quite a bit of traffic.

Thanks to all who visit. It's fun for me to do and is giving me some practice at writing. My new year's resolution was to start that book that I have been putting off for years. We'll see.