Stats & thanks

Thank you for reading my blog. I am walking on a knife’s edge, as I agonise over whom to thank first: new followers – of which there have been quite a few, or those who have been reading my posts for years.

Suffice to say that my gratitude, like peanut butter on a decent piece of toast, is evenly spread.

I suppose I should apologise for that simile, but I like peanut butter too much to do so with any degree of sincerity.

I see that this blog has recently clocked just over 35,000 visits. Those of you who blog at WordPress will know that bloggers are privy to all sorts of statistics. Although WordPress’s other back-office functions have improved, the stats are now provided in a way that is designed to make the blogger feel good, nothing more.

This means that I cannot easily see how many visitors those 35,000 visits represent, but if I whiz through the annual stats, and take heed that each visitor makes on average 1.5 views (sounds like 2.4 kids, doesn’t it?), then I can safely say that those 35,000 visits are representative of around 23,300 visitors, but not, obviously 23,300 different visitors. This becomes even less impressive when I divide that figure by nine to get an annual average of 2,592 visitors, or a daily average of 7.1 visitors.

I have just crunched the numbers in the paragraph above as I was typing., and had a good old laugh about the 7.1 visitors per day. The coincidence of arriving at the answer of 7.1 for an entirely different sum performed before I started typing (an answer which WordPress did not give me: I had to do my own calculations) is most pleasing indeed.

Let me explain. On this blog, I have written since its inception a total of 248,839 words spanning 461 blog posts, meaning that the average number of words per post is just under 540. (You will see that the average for the two previous years is under 500 words, and this is pleasing too.) Given that when I started writing this post, the number of visits sat at 35,055, I used this figure to work out something that WordPress definitely could not tell me right off the bat, and that was the number of words per visit. It is, as you can see from the table below, 7.1.

Now, that is a weird metric if ever there was one, but I wanted it precisely because—as we all know—language is as long as a piece of string, and there is no metric in existence which can sensibly submit it to an audit. Quod est demonstrandum. Ha!

Thank you to you all for reading my offerings here. Come back often, and feel free to comment. I am planning to write a lot more this year, and I promise it will not be quite as nonsensical as my approach to statistics.