Monthly Report for August 2012

In August, traffic here at Politics Plus was way down in all major categories.  The reason was obvious.  With kidney stones, major heart testing, and severe musculoskeletal issues, not to mention a couple record heat waves and volunteer work, I was gone more than I was here.  The blog’s poor showing was due to me and me alone.

Reported period	Month Aug 2012
First visit	01 Aug 2012 – 00:00
Last visit	31 Aug 2012 – 23:59
	Unique visitors	Number of visits	Pages	Hits	Bandwidth
Viewed traffic *	11,331	25,354 (2.23 visits/visitor)	306,317 (12.08 Pages/Visit)	635,068 (25.04 Hits/Visit)	10.86 GB (448.97 KB/Visit)
Not viewed traffic *			252,802	315,823	6.39 GB

Not viewed traffic is people who read our blog without coming here, using RSS Readers, such as Feed Demon, and Aggregation sites, such as Google Reader and MyWeb.

Here are our 2011 stats.

And here are our 2012 stats so you can compare them.

Here is our most recent ClustrMap, last updated on September 1.  Note that our map reset on February 28.  The largest circles represent over 1,000 visits. The tiniest represent one to ten.

Our average durations were down.

Number of visits: 25,354 – Average: 268 s	Number of visits	Percent
0s-30s	21,030	82.9 %
30s-2mn	1,036	4 %
2mn-5mn	471	1.8 %
5mn-15mn	628	2.4 %
15mn-30mn	478	1.8 %
30mn-1h	966	3.8 %
1h+	745	2.9 %

That’s expected, because there was less for folks to see here.

Here are our top five articles for July.

Bernie Sanders to Obama                             6/27/2011  1,394

Why to Keep Them Closed                           8/04/2012     743

Republican Supply-side Jesus on Display         7/24/2012     634

10 Reasons to Give Mars to the Republicans    8/11/2012     423

Bullied by a Wimp?                                      8/04/2912     354

That’s a very poor showing.

Search engine referrals were down.

17 different referring search engines	Pages	Percent	Hits	Percent
Google	5331	58.3 %	11,618	71.5 %
Stumbleupon (Social Bookmark)	3081	33.6 %	3,305	20.3 %
Microsoft Bing	311	3.4 %	507	3.1 %
Yahoo!	220	2.4 %	362	2.2 %
Unknown search engines	60	0.6 %	92	0.5 %
Google (Images)	54	0.5 %	147	0.9 %
Yandex	36	0.3 %	46	0.2 %
AOL	26	0.2 %	29	0.1 %
Ask	9	0 %	9	0 %
MyWebSearch	6	0 %	6	0 %
Dogpile	5	0 %	7	0 %
Microsoft MSN Search	2	0 %	2	0 %
Earth Link	1	0 %	1	0 %
InfoSpace	1	0 %	2	0 %
Microsoft Windows Live	1	0 %	55	0.3 %
Mamma			1	0 %
Go.com

Our top five non-blog referrers are:

http://www.care2.com/             1,095

http://www.reddit.com/               540

http://www.jabberwonk.com/       309

http://www.tumblr.com/              217

http://www.facebook.com/           119

Reddit and Tumblr are up.  The rest are down.

Our top 15 blog/news referrers are:

http://synapticstew.com/

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

http://www.roseanneworld.com/

http://frieddogleg.blogspot.com/

http://themoderatevoice.com/

http://bildungblog.blogspot.com/

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

http://oakcreekforum.blogspot.com/

http://infidel753.blogspot.com/

http://theleftinme.blogspot.com/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com

http://www.buckdogpolitics.blogspot.ca/

http://progressiveerupts.blogspot.com/

http://parsleyspics.blogspot.com/

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

http://jackjodell53.wordpress.com/

There was a two way tie for 15th.  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.

Here are the top fifteen commenters for August.  I actually remembered and copied them off in time.  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, also get linkey-love here.

Lynn Squance (105)

Patty (82)

Jerry Critter (40)

SoINeedAName (33)

Rixar13 (30)

Edith Belcher (26)

Phyllis (16)

Gypsy (14)

mamabear (13)

Lisa Gunther (5)

Marva (5)

John Dasef (4)

Steve (4)

Blue (2)

Howard Brazee (2)

Jolly Roger (2)

Kevin (2)

Lisa G. (2)

We have 575,775 links on other websites, a slight decrease.

Our Technorati.rating is down to 116, low on the B list.  I have no idea why.  Despite over half a million links, Technorati only recognizes links on sites that have registered at Technorati.  Because we had so much traffic on Buzzflash.net, a registered site, we used to be an A list blog.  Buzzflash.net is gone and with the slowdown, we’re back to B list.  If Care2 were to register with Technorati, we’d be in fat city.

We have 3,646 articles and 34,454 comments, as of midnight September 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.

Your participation remains a major part of what makes this blog worth reading, not to mention worth writing.  Thank you all for all you do, here and elsewhere, to support progressive solutions.  Together we are make are difference, and I hope I can get my own participation up sufficiently to be worthy of you.

We are still  well under the traffic we had a year ago.  That’s only partially because I’m posting a little less than I did then to take better care of myself.  The big reason we’re down is still that many of the tools I used to publicize our articles are no longer available. That makes your help that much more important.  We are less than 70 days from an election upon which America’s future depends.  We still have work to do.