Happy Birthday to Me! - Blog stats for the curious

El Yuma (aka, Theodore Aloysius Henken II, aka, Ted) turned 39 on October 7, 2010. 

Today this blog, also called El Yuma, turns one year old.  We've been on-line for a year.  Hooray!

It turns out that back on October 7 the readers of the blog gave me an inadvertant birthday gift.  On that day, the blog received a new record of 217 visits in a single day, most coming to see the post "Twitter responds and we learn a few lessons" (many visitors were referred by Ernesto over at Penultimos Dias - thanx Ernesto).

I want to give a big, fat, Cuban "mil gracias" to all my loyal readers, commentators, those who have sent me individual e-mails, and especially to those who have placed El Yuma on thier blogrolls and linked to me in their posts over the past year.

Referral sources are one of the main way a blog grows, gains followers, and establishes a profile in the web.  The leading referral sources over the past year for El Yuma are: Yoani and her gang over at DesdeCuba.com (5,705), Phil at The Cuban Triangle (4,050), Tracey at Along the Malecon (1,494), Ernesto at Penultimos Dias (1,249), and Wilfredo and Ivette at Cafe Fuerte.

For those interested, what follows is a round-up of the stats from the past year, from my very first blog post on October 29, 2009, "Aplatanado" through the Taxman post I put up yesterday, October 27.

Some quick basics: From late-October through the end of December 2009, I put up 40 blog posts.  So far in 2010, I have posted (including this one) 199 times.  That's a total of 239 posts in 365 days.  Not too shabby.  My slowest month was February, 2010 with just 7 posts and my busiest month was July, 2010 with 41 posts, though September (30) and October (20) have also been quite busy given all the things happening in Havana. 

Though I have been a bit underwhelmed with the comments section of my blog, in total there have been 174 comments.  There were actually a lot more comments back when I started in November and December of 2009 (especially when I was busy defending Yoani Sanchez), but comments have dropped off a bit since then.

So 365 days, 239 posts, and 174 comments, in one year.

I would say that my most common themes are the Cuban Blogosphere (and here) and Cuban Economic Reforms (and here), but interestingly (or perhaps embarassingly?) my blog posts about Flan, Lechón, La Charanga Habanera (and here), and Revolico are among my most popular / most visited ones. 

But hell, what can I say, people like to eat, dance, and shop!

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Above is the EKG of El Yuma over the past year.  I hadn't learned to properly set up the Google stats tracking code, which explains the "flatlines" in October and part of December.  Still you can see that there is a very regular weekly trend - i.e., people check the blog during the week (from work?) and take a break on the weekends.  You can also see my birthday present on the screenshot - 217 visits on October 7, 2010.

Also, I'm happy to see a very gradual but fairly clear upward trend in average daily visits - moving from around 80 per day in the beginning to 150 per day now.  The screenshot also shows my total visits (32,849) and pageviews (43,814).  The blog has also received a total of 16,656 unique visitors giving it a 50.55% of new visits.  I guess our collective attention span is not what it once was - giving me an average time on site of just 1:25 minutes.

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This screenshot shows the world wide web in action.  El Yuma has received its 32,849 visits from 149 different countries (and 3,450 cities!).  You can see that the U.S. is the faraway leader with 22,290 visits, followed by Canada (2,060), Spain, (1,465), the UK, (956) and Mexico (796).  In sixth place is our beloved CUBA with 605 visits.  The top ten list of visitors is rounded out by Italy, Germany, France, and Switzerland.

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Below is the list of the top visits by city.  Unsurprisingly, the top three cities arre New York (3,695), Washington, D.C. (1,306) [let's hope one of those is from the State Department or the White House!], and Miami (1,187) [I'm sure it's the Diaz-Balart brothers!].  The rest of the cities on the list are fascinating given that New York reappears (944), followed by LA (804) [a shout out to my friends on the Left Coast], and then we are back to South Florida in the heart of Cuban-American country (Hialeah, Los Alamitos? [dónde está eso?], and Pompano Beach).  Rounding out the top ten are the sister cities of La Habana and Seattle? (both with 580 visits).

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Finally, below is a list of my most popular blog posts.  The stats that I have reported above are from the "Google Analytics" program.  However, Blogger just introduced an internal tracking program that is a bit easier to use (but that does not give as detailed data).  Also, since the Blogger tracking program has only been functioning for 2-3 months, its totals and rankings are different.  As you can see on the right side of the blog, below my two blogrolls and my archives, I have added a top ten list of favorite posts based on this Blogger stats program.  Blogger also recently added new features that has allowed me to add a search function and a monthly tracking metric, both of which are found atop the blogroll.

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According to Google Analytics, my most popular posts are Revolico (626), Flan (496), Generacion Y, The Making of (469), Open Letter (365), two posts on La Charanga Habanera (345 and 318), Requiem for La Guarida (322), and a post I did from New Orleans on Creoles (314).

The list from the Blogger internal tracking mechanism is fairly similar but has only been on-line tracking visits over the past 2-3 months.  In addtion to the posts mentioned in the previous paragraph, there are also my Lechón recipe, Japy San Guivi (316), La Flaca in the Washington Post (269), Twitter Responds (211), The (Grand)Children of the Revolution (139), Little Brother (99), and the Russian spy saga (75). 

Keep coming back.  I'm looking forward to another fruitful and provocative year!