Entry levels

According to my site stats, 60% of you are coming to the main page via direct request. 18% of you are coming via RSS feeds. That latter statistic keeps climbing as more people are using RSS readers. My pageviews seem to be running at about 2.5 per visit, which is back to my pre-WP high average. WordPress tends to inflate page views–if you click on a post’s comments, that counts as two pageviews, the post, and the page with the comments on it. (That’s why I want comments popup boxes, Jay.) On my old site, pageviews were utterly pure, no padding at all–one page per view, so a 2.5 pageview meant that the average user read 2.5 pages each visit. That started to die down about the time my traffic died down. There was one point where I was at, something like 1.3 pageviews, and 30 seconds average time spent. Of course, that was around the time I wasn’t posting very much.

My current visitor count depends on which stats program you use–there’s a difference of many hundreds between the lowest and highest visitor rate. So I have either a steady 1200, or a visitor count of about 2200 per day. I don’t know which is more reliable, Webalizer or AWStats. There are discrepancies in my site stats to the effect that I don’t really trust any of the services too much. For instance, on a day when I got 4,000+ hits on Sitemeter after an Instalink, both my site stats from HM had me at a little bit higher than normal, missing about 2,500 visitors. I generally discount Sitemeter’s averages, because it doesn’t count RSS, and misses tons of hits, but it’s a good site to check traffic patterns.

What interests me the most is that my traffic remains fairly consistent, and chugging slowly upward, in spite of the paucity of new links from my fellow bloggers. I guess my audience has matured over the years from curiosity seekers to loyal readers. Which would explain why you all were so insistent that I not change the blog last year, when I was experimenting with The Jewish View.

I think I’ll look for a plugin that allows you to email posts to your friends. I think word-of-mouth (or word-of-email) seems to be the best way my blog traffic will continue to grow. I’m really not into the gimmicky stuff. Yeah, I’d love to get some of the traffic that the polemicists get, but then I’d have to be a polemicist, and, well, you have to yell too much for my tastes.

If blogs had been around when I was in my twenties, however… Oh, well. That’s what college was for.