The other night I decided to have a good look at the statistics provided by WordPress, the blog software that we are using. It’s really interesting! It not only shows the number of hits that our blog has received since its inception, but also how people find our blog. Here are some of the things that the stats reveal:

• Over the past year we have had about 1000 hits. A lot of those hits have originated from search engine robots, but even if we discount a large percentage, that’s still a lot of “real” visitors. Note that the statistics software is smart enough to exclude my own visits to the blog.
• Our two busiest days were the 24th of August, when we first went public with the blog, with 46 visitors, and for some strange reason, two days ago. I don’t know why, but we were really popular on Tuesday, receiving just under 50 visitors.
• Here is a selection of search terms that people entered: “pinockio amsterdam”, “reinigingspolitie amsterdam”, “wat is hunters bar in de warmoesstraat”. I can only assume that after using these search terms they then clicked through to our blog, otherwise it would not show up in the stats (though I may be wrong). When I googled the same terms, I was surprised to see that our blog often shows up very high on the search results, sometimes within the first five results. Possibly something that businesses here should think about?

The image above (click on it to enlarge it) shows the number of visits to the blog in the previous 30 days (American software, so the month is shown first). The last value is for today (09-18) recorded at the time that I posted this, just before lunch: eight visitors, so far.

Edited to add: I have taken a closer look and realise that the statistics software excludes both search engines and anyone who is logged in (ie, authors of the blog). In other words, all these hits are real visitors. Oh, and by the way, we ending up receiving a total of 30 visitors on this day.