The "Extraordinary Readers of My Blog" Story

It was an ordinary day. And .... I'm impressed! Impressed with myself! A few days ago I lost the counter on my blog. I added the counter back in 2009 when my wife asked me if I had any idea how many people were reading the stories that I was writing. Since I didn't, I added a counter. Holy cow! Some days as many as 50 people would tune in and read the stories. Well, after a year and a half the counter had reached almost 15,000. I checked it every so often to see if some of the dumb stories I had to tell were slowing down the amount of people who read them. Nope! When I found that the counter had disappeared, I was disappointed. I knew approximately the amount on the counter when it went kaput. I got into the blog program and found out that the counter had been disabled. Why? Seems that blogspot, who carries my blog, had started a place where you could add a counter, and anyone who had one had it disabled. I started a new one and was able to start it where the old one had left off. Then I started to explore all the other features of blogspot. Unbelievable what I found. On one page it told me my all-time favorite stories that I had posted. That distinction goes to a story posted on November 26, 2009 titled "The Puka Dog Story". Story about a great hot dog sold on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. Were you one of the 277 people that read that story? If you were, thanks. The "Ma Doudou Story" placed 2nd and was posted February 2, 2010 and was about flavored rum made on the island of Saint Martin. It has 108 readers. "The Last Game" of November 4, 2009 which was about my last softball game due to getting hit in the face with a line drive and "Learning to Live with JD" from May 13, 2011 about my granddaughter dealing with Juvenile Diabetes were also in the top ten. My final post of the first year of my blog titled "The Final Chapter of LDub", which was my imaginary obituary and was posted September 1, 2010 was also in the top 10. Another neat page I found was a bar graph showing an overview of daily, weekly, monthly and all-time readership. Seems that the month with the most readers tuning in was August of 2010. That month 1,108 viewers read my stories. To me, that's unbelievable!! Carol asked me why I don't put ads on my blog. You get a stipend every time someone clicks on an ad while looking at your blog. I initially chose not to do that because I hate to read other blogs that feature that service. Another statistic on blogspot shows you readers of your blog by countries. Naturally the USA leads the way, but I have readship in: United Kingdom (20 people), India (8), Russia (8), Pakistan (6), Philippines (5), Canada (4), Croatia (3), Australia (2), Costa Rica (2) as well as a few on different islands in the Caribbean. Carol suggested I click on the box that would change my blog to other languages and I may increase my readership. Maybe an option sometime soon. Most people follow me on Internet Explorer while others use Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Opera. And by far the most popular operating system is Windows (67%) followed by Mac (29%), while a few follow on their iPhone or iPod. Hey, thanks to all of you for these neat stats. It kind of blows my mind when I read this stuff. I'm just having fun typing and seems that people all over the world are tuned in. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary day.