Monthly Report for October 2011

In October, Politics Plus enjoyed record highs in Uniques, Page views, and Bandwidth.  I consider page views most important, because to generate more than one page view on a visit, someone has to open other articles to actually read your comments.  It was our second best month for Visitors, and third best for Hits.  This both surprised and pleased me, because we lost our second biggest Non-blog referrer, Buzzflash.  They are no more.  Furthermore, our traffic from Stumbleupon continues to drop, because their format changes have been so unpopular that people are leaving in droves.  On top of that I missed four days.

Here are our basic stats:

In addition we also had 285,411 page views, 376,138 hits and and 7.16 GB of external traffic.  These are mainly from people reading articles from our RSS feed instead of coming to the site to do so.

Here is our most recent ClustrMap, last updated on November 1.

Our ClustrMap reset the morning of 2/28/2011, starting over from scratch. This map counts only visits since then. The largest circles represent over 1,000 visits. The tiniest represent one to ten.

Our average durations were down from 211 seconds last month:

Number of visits: 52,187 – Average: 209 s	Number of visits	Percent
0s-30s	43,757	83.8 %
30s-2mn	2,627	5 %
2mn-5mn	1,051	2 %
5mn-15mn	1,260	2.4 %
15mn-30mn	911	1.7 %
30mn-1h	1,595	3 %
1h+	986	1.8 %

That essentially unchanged.

Search engine referrals were up, except for Stumbleupon.

23 different referring search engines	Pages	Percent	Hits	Percent
Google	6252	55.1 %	8,933	53.2 %
Stumbleupon (Social Bookmark)	4377	38.6 %	6,774	40.3 %
Yahoo!	180	1.5 %	286	1.7 %
Microsoft Bing	163	1.4 %	261	1.5 %
Microsoft MSN Search	145	1.2 %	145	0.8 %
AOL	46	0.4 %	46	0.2 %
Ask	45	0.3 %	45	0.2 %
Unknown search engines	41	0.3 %	42	0.2 %
Google (Images)	31	0.2 %	51	0.3 %
Microsoft Windows Live	28	0.2 %	66	0.3 %
MyWebSearch	8	0 %	11	0 %
Dogpile	5	0 %	7	0 %
Virgilio	4	0 %	4	0 %
Digg (Social Bookmark)	3	0 %	32	0.1 %
Earth Link	2	0 %	2	0 %
WebCrawler	2	0 %	2	0 %
Yandex	2	0 %	19	0.1 %
T-Online	1	0 %	1	0 %
Kvasir	1	0 %	1	0 %
Scroogle	1	0 %	1	0 %
GoodSearch	1	0 %	1	0 %
Mamma			5	0 %
Go.com			39	0.2 %

Our top four non-blog referrers are:

http://www.reddit.com/               17,436

http://www.care2.com/                 4,583

http://www.jabberwonk.com/           964

http://www.facebook.com/               478

Our top 15 blog referrers are:

http://crooksandliars.com/

http://jbm479.wordpress.com/

http://america-weeps.blogspot.com/

http://parsleyspics.blogspot.com/

http://infidel753.blogspot.com/

http://jackjodell53.wordpress.com/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

http://whohijackedourcountry.blogspot.com/

http://bildungblog.blogspot.com/

http://themanwhowalksalonewalksfaster.blogspot.com/

http://reconstitution.us/rcnew/

http://katieschwartz.com/

http://republic-of-gilead.blogspot.com/

http://okjimmseggrollemporium.blogspot.com/

http://progressiveerupts.blogspot.com/

http://www.oakcreekforum.blogspot.com/

There is an extra, because there was a tie for 15th place.

Here’s some linkey-love in return  The best ways you can spread the message to others is to use the share button at the bottom of each article to list our articles on the the networking sites where you belong. Quote PP articles on your own blogs also helps.  The operative commandment here is “thou shalt steal.”  We’re on the same side here, and I encourage it.  Even if you want to repost a whole article, that’s OK.  Just link back, please.  Also, feel free to swipe my graphics in the articles.  If they are labeled with our Politics Plus URL, they are my work.

The top fifteen commenters for September are not missing this time, because I actually remembered to copy them off in time on the night of the 31st.  Here they are:

• Lynn Squance (132)
• Patty (94)
• SoINeedAName (70)
• Phyllis (61)
• Memphis Johnny (47)
• Jerry Critter (38)
• Jack Jodell (31)
• lee (31)
• TWM (13)
• AnnH (12)
• Blue (12)
• Lisa G. (12)
• Maria (11)
• Tom (11)
• Charles (10)
• Jolly Roger (10)

 

The widget is in the right column.  I don’t count, as I’m the resident big mouth, and I try to reply to every comment, except replies directed at someone else.  Those who leave their URLs in their comments, get linkey-love.

Technorati makes even less sense again this month.  Our performance was up, but the site that gave us the vast majority of our influential referrals is gone.  Politics and US Politics ratings are down, as expected, but our Global rating is up, putting us back on the A list.  I have no idea why.  They removed our World rating again for reasons unknown.    Still, with 450 million active, English language blogs in the world, it’s great to be in the top 2,500.  This site’s authorities across Technorati:

We have 884,291 links on other websites, up from 417,917 last month.

We have 2,914 articles and 25,360 comments, as of midnight 11/1.

I recommend using your own avatar. Go to Gravatar.  Sign up using the email address you use to post comments here and upload the image you want to use.  Whenever you comment under that email address here or on any WordPress blog (several others too), that image will be your avatar.

I removed the called sendlove.to, because you weren’t using it. 

I could not find a Smiley toolbar compatible with our full featured graphic editor that gives you a wide range of ways you can express yourselves, including pictures.  I posted a separate page listing text shortcuts for smileys that you can keep open in a different tab.

Your participation remains a major part of what makes this blog worth reading, not to mention worth writing. Many people who visit here have told me that they come here to read your comments in addition to my articles, and people continue to write comments about your comments on other sites.  Politics Plus exists to help end right-wing insanity and send the Republican Party the way of the Whigs.  Thank you all for all you do, here and elsewhere, to help make that happen.  Our success is because of you.