Stats and More Stats

Google's Blogger.com, the blog authoring service that stands behind the blogs hosted on Blogspot.com, recently released an interface to statistics about the blog. This includes details like most popular posts, traffic sources, and audience, all of which can be examined over various time frames like the last day, week, or month (*). The base data only goes back to July 2010, so the most interesting numbers are for 'All Time', meaning the last seven months.

Let there be no misunderstanding here. As I pointed out in a post titled Apples to Apples on my main blog, this chess960 blog is the least popular of the chess resources I maintain and I doubt that the situation has changed much since I wrote that post in April 2010. Keeping that in mind, let's peek at some of the info revealed by the stats. First, here's a graphical overview showing where this blog's visitors are located.

A darker green means more page views and, while I'm not surprised to see English speaking countries with darker shades, I am surprised to see south of Brazil the dark patch identifying Uruguay. Not too long ago I received an email from a correspondent in Uruguay who flagged an online play site that was new to me, so I'll take a closer look at that site in a future post.

As for past posts, what most interests the blog's visitors? Of the top-10 posts by page view, three posts received considerably more attention than the others:-

• CCRL Discussion Board
  
• Chess960 Tournaments Are Rare Birds
  
• Advanced Chess960 @ Chess.com

I'm at a loss to explain why those posts should be more popular than others. A more recent post that also shows higher than average interest is:-

• A Highbrow Dismissal of Chess960

After that, most posts receive approximately the same number of visits. Moving on to traffic sources, i.e. sites that send visitors to this blog, the number one source is my main blog Chess for All Ages. Number two is listed as www.google.com/search?q=blogger, which must be a Google blog search on 'chess960'. I haven't looked at that resource in a long time and it's due another visit.

Also in the top-10 sources are a number of Chess.com forums, something called the Pingy Web Application ('some Blogs you might want to visit while waiting', where I spotted this chess960 blog), and Chess Quotes (aka Rotten Tomatoes). The tomatoes link has a Bobby Fischer audio clip where he says a lot of the same things found in the video clip that I recently covered in 'Me and Bobby Fischer' and Chess960.

The Blogger page on traffic sources also lists the top search keywords used to find this blog. It informs that the phrase 'chess 960' is used even more than the single word 'chess960'. The most unusual keyword is 'rkrnbbnq' -- if you try searching on it, Google first tries to show you results for 'krn bbq', which it interprets to be 'Korean barbecue'?! Rounding out the Blogger stats are the usual summaries of visitor profiles given by all log analyzers:-

Pageviews by Browsers:-
33% Firefox
26% Internet Explorer
22% Safari

and

Pageviews by Operating Systems:-
66% Windows
26% Macintosh

A long time ago I learned not to place too much importance on web stats. Their most practical use is as a source of ideas for future posts, just like here, where I came up with two.

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(*) In case anyone is concerned about privacy (aren't we all?), there is no raw data log available to the blog owner, meaning no information about specific visitors.