Fun with Blogger stats (no really, it's pretty interesting and there's not much math involved)

(Please don't let the title scare you--you're reading the blog of an English major with an aversion to math that's more complicated than total bases divided by at-bats; there will be no quiz.  Also, there may end up being more images than numbers!  OH NO, THAT'S A RATIO!)

Math is hard!

I realize this is a bit of a throwaway topic for some, but it's something I've been wanting to do for a while.  I often compulsively check my Blogger stats just to see how many people are reading my blog, who referred them, which posts are most popular, etc.  It's kind of fun and often fairly enlightening, and sometimes it's even a bit surprising, but most of the time it's just plain entertaining.  With all that said, here are some fun, enlightening, surprising and entertaining stats:


Where you're from:

In Soviet Russia, bloggers follow yoooooooooooooooou

Naturally most of my audience is from the States, but I have a surprising number of readers from Russia, Germany and Slovenia.  That, or a few of you love to read my blog several times a day while you're downloading porn through a proxy.  Either way, thanks!  I figure my popularity in Russia is due to my communistic leanings during group breaks, where I like to do my best to see everyone get their fair share of good stuff.  Since we're doing stats, here's a useful chart:

For me the biggest surprise here was that another primarily English-speaking country like Canada, represented here by Ralph Wiggum, 

wasn't higher up on the list.  Finally, if you're reading this from Sweeden, sweet little baby Jesus why aren't you outside ogling your extremely hot women?

Page hits here I come!

What you're reading:

Note:  this blog opened for business on 8/28/10

This ends up being just about my favorite metric to look at because I'm always surprised by what the most popular posts end up being.  First of all, the huge spike in January of this year is easy to explain:  some of you might recall my epic run of purchases from the Blowout forums, which I was posting for quite a while.  I made quite a few buys and some of the stuff was pretty exciting, so I'm not too surprised that a lot of you were interested.  Five of those posts are in the top 10, including the #1 and #4 spots.  I can't really come up for a reason for the June spike, though.
#2 might have benefited from being in the middle of that explosion of excitement/quality (much like shows that succeeded after Seinfeld made Thursday "Must See TV.").  That was my third trade with BA Benny, and it was a pretty good one, though I can't identify anything about it that screams "This is the second best post you've ever done!"  Chalk it up to Mike being awesome plus the Seinfeld effect of the Blowout Blowout, I guess.
#3 is actually one of my favorites because there's a good variety of stuff, including a few exciting bits.  Beardy sent me an awesome trade package that November, and I led off with that.  I was most ecstatic about my Michigan quad autograph that I won on eBay.  Finally, I recapped the replacement packs Topps sent me because I was shorted one in a 2010 Topps Chrome football value pack, and the big winner here was actually a big loser:  Jimmy Clausen, in the form of an autograph I later sold.  Again, I couldn't point to a factor that made this top-five material, so in this case I'll attribute it to everyone loving Beardy.
I'll stop with #5 for the sake of relative brevity.  The popularity of this one is just about the least surprising to me because this was the point when I began posting my PC of baseball RCs, most of them being classic older cards, which I think struck a nerve with some of the veteran collectors around here who might be a bit jaded about the direction in which RCs have gone recently (count me in).  I'm hoping it made some of you go back and admire your own rookie card collections since they surely include some of your favorite players.


What you're using to read this:

Let's see, 25% + 8% = 33% of you that are awesome and use Firefox or Chrome instead of IE or the other less-desirable options (though I have nothing against Opera). 

Not bad, only about 8% of you are hipster douches that are too busy being smug to comment!


How you got here:  referrals:

Ever since I bribed a bunch of you to link to me, I've been getting good numbers of hits from being on some of your blogrolls.  My number one source of hits, though, is definitely the excellent Sports Card Blogroll.  If I didn't use Google Reader to aggregate all of the awesome blogs I follow, I'd definitely be on this every day.  As it is, I still use it to find new and interesting blogs to follow (although my number one source for new items is definitely blogrolls and trade posts on other blogs).
The rest of my top 10 is filled out by some pretty popular bloggers:

• dayf of Cardboard Junkie, who did an awesome job pimping my bribes for links post    
• Night Owl of Night Owl Cards, who did his awesome "What's the Best Card In the Package" feature for my trade with him
• Ted from Crinkly Wrappers, whom I'll surely trade with one day since somebody has to take my Blue Jays!
• Mike of BA Benny's Card and Pack Rip Cafes, who's making up for not sending as many pageviews my way by constructing a pneumatic delivery system between our houses since we trade so often
• Johnny/Hiflew of Cards From the Quarry, a.k.a. Purple Rain, my favorite Colorado blogger
• Beardy's old blog, so we'll attribute this to the excellent Mojo Beard blog, the best triumvirate of card bloggers I know of
• Spankee of My Cardboard Mistress, a guy who lives by Jefferson Burdick's philosophy (though hopefully without the crippling injuries)
• All About Cards, which is a great source for card news and box breaks, including one of the better ideas I've seen in the blogging business--their SpeedBreak
• Drew of Drew's Cards, a Yankee collector I can somewhat forgive because he collects Granderson

A big thanks to all of you on this list and everyone else who links to me.  I always return the favor and I never add someone to my blogroll without following them in Google Reader, leading me to a huge collection of awesome and entertaining blogs that help me enjoy the down times throughout my day.

Searches:  useful and not-so-useful:

While these are sometimes interesting, I do this mostly for the hilarity factor, mainly because I love using funny and/or popular pop culture references in my posts.

All-time

Well I'm glad people are finding me when they search for "Too Many Grandersons", although the ones that are searching for my URL could probably save themselves a step....  I mainly wanted to show this to prove that this many people are searching for "unfrozen caveman lawyer" which I've referenced at least once.

This month (July-August, 2011)

Awww, nothing hilarious here.  I do think it's cool that people were finding me after search for Jon Runyan, though.  Oddly enough, I only have the one hit of him.

This week (August 3-10, 2011)

I'm saving "Uncle Sam Earth" for the next section, but I love that I've used "fffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuu" enough that somebody searched it and ended up here.  I also love that I just googled "fffffffffuuuuuuu" and got back "Did you mean: fffffffffuuuuuuuu ?"

Today (August 10, 2011)

To the three people that searched "uncle sam earth" today alone, I want to marry you all and start a sect that embraces polygamy, baseball cards and The Simpsons.  I've used this image several times,

and I don't blame anybody else who'd want to use it.  To those of you that searched boring stuff and got here, turn around and go back to Shelbyville and your attractive cousins.


I hope this has been interesting for at least some of you, and I also hope that it gets you to look at your own stats if you haven't been doing that.  If not, you might be surprised (or entertained) by what you find.  Who knows, it might inspire you to become the #1 google result for "Topps collation is like testicular torsion while Black Eyed Peas music is blared in the middle of the English riots."