July 2, 2017
The Hit Counts
Every day at noon or so, Europe time, we would check the blog's hit count. The hit count is updated daily on the web site, sometime after midnight in North America. All that is reported is the total count since the blog began, so Dodie would compare the day's count to the previous day as noted in her little book, to see the current daily hits.
Why would we care enough to go through this daily ritual and calculation? It's the same question as why would we care enough to spend three hours daily actually doing the blog? The idea is that somebody has to be reading it to make it worth while writing it. And the more that are reading the more the effort is justified.
So how did we do this time? On the one hand, the hits were quite a few, and more than are often seen on Crazyguyonabike blogs. On the other hand, hits have been declining over the years. Our second blog, "Grampies on the Go - Again" has garnered so far 194,000 hits, while "On Their Knees" to date is at about 70,000 hits. Why this should be is a bit of a mystery, and maybe can not be answered given the lack of statistics that the site collects on who is reading a given blog, where on the net they come from, and where in the actual world they come from.
We do have the feeling that the site overall is declining, but again we have no statistics or reasons.
Looking at the daily hits of this current blog, there are also some puzzles. We know that while a tour is ongoing its daily hits have the best chance of being high. People are more interested in something that is happening right now than in something that happened in some past year. That itself is strange, because we all enjoy reading books, many of which describe events that are decade or even hundreds of years old. But with blogs, it has to be happening now, mostly. So that explains why when the trip ends the hits drop. But with "On Their Knees" the hits began to drop in May, just half way through.
We reached Santiago de Compostella on May 18, and many people thought that was basically the end of the tour. We know that because we got a lot of congratulations on a great tour messages. That's why the headline on May 19was HEY EVERYONE, TRIP IS ONLY 1/2 DONE! On the other hand, daily hits had already begun to decline at the beginning of May. Go figure.
This was the picture:
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Despite this somewhat gloomy view of things, we can again report that among the over 12,000 cycling blogs on this site, "On Their Knees" currently rates Sixth in terms of daily average hits. That is no doubt partly due to how the average is calculated, but hey, that's what the table says!
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