Monthly Report for August 2011

In August, Politics Plus performed much better in every category. Uniques, visits, page views, hits and bandwidth are all up from July.  I consider page views most important, because to generate more than one page view on a visit, someone has to open other pages to actually read them.  After kids are back in school, I expect traffic to increase.

Here are our basic stats:

Here is our most recent Clustrmap, last updated on September 1.

Our Clustrmap reset the morning of 2/28, 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 240 seconds last month:

Number of visits: 41,950 – Average: 232 s	Number of visits	Percent
0s-30s	34,569	82.4 %
30s-2mn	1,918	4.5 %
2mn-5mn	1,160	2.7 %
5mn-15mn	1,287	3 %
15mn-30mn	890	2.1 %
30mn-1h	1,308	3.1 %
1h+	936	2.2 %

That’s normal, because more visitors usually include more pit stops.

Search engine referrals were well up.

23 different referring search engines	Pages	Percent	Hits	Percent
Stumbleupon (Social Bookmark)	7093	60.2 %	8,857	56.2 %
Google	3083	26.1 %	5,015	31.8 %
Microsoft MSN Search	709	6 %	709	4.5 %
Microsoft Bing	565	4.7 %	649	4.1 %
Yahoo!	164	1.3 %	267	1.6 %
Ask	33	0.2 %	33	0.2 %
AOL	32	0.2 %	32	0.2 %
Google (Images)	28	0.2 %	44	0.2 %
Yandex	18	0.1 %	34	0.2 %
Unknown search engines	15	0.1 %	16	0.1 %
Microsoft Windows Live	12	0.1 %	49	0.3 %
MyWebSearch	5	0 %	11	0 %
Earth Link	3	0 %	3	0 %
Onet.pl	2	0 %	2	0 %
Digg (Social Bookmark)	2	0 %	2	0 %
MetaCrawler (Metamoteur)	1	0 %	1	0 %
Dogpile	1	0 %	6	0 %
WebCrawler	1	0 %	1	0 %
Kvasir	1	0 %	1	0 %
Scroogle	1	0 %	1	0 %
Excite	1	0 %	1	0 %
ix quick	1	0 %	1	0 %
Mamma			4	0 %

Our top four non-blog referrers are:

http://www.reddit.com/           8,500+

http://www.buzzflash.net/       5,300+

http://www.care2.com/            3,900+

http://www.jabberwonk.com/    1,200+

Our top 15 blog referrers are:

http://jbm479.wordpress.com/

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

http://themanwhowalksalonewalksfaster.blogspot.com/

http://parsleyspics.blogspot.com/

http://whohijackedourcountry.blogspot.com/

http://infidel753.blogspot.com/

http://annette-justmylittlepieceoftheworld.blogspot.com/

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

http://bildungblog.blogspot.com/

http://www.democraticunderground.com/

http://jackjodell53.wordpress.com/

http://threeamigostotheleft.com/

http://katieschwartz.com/

http://themoderatevoice.com/

http://theleftinme.blogspot.com/

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.  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 URL, they are my work.

The top fifteen commenters for August are missing, because I forgot to copy them off in time on the night of the 31st, and once they’re gone, I can’t get them back.  Mea culpa.

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.  Those who leave their URLs in their comments, get linkey love.

Technorati makes little sense again this month.  Our performance was up and so were our ratings and ranks in both Politics and US Politics, but our Global rating remained the same.  We are now B list globally, but A list in both categories..

We have 507,580 links on other websites, down from 600,279 from last month.

We have 2,708 articles and 22,341 comments, as of midnight 9/1.

We have new wacky avatars, and I rotate them each month, but 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 e mail address here or on any WordPress blog (several others too), that image will be your avatar.

We have a new plug-in called sendlove.to.  To vote or give your opinion about any of the famous people in an article, go to the comments page and click the tab for that person.  Register using your Google, Facebook or Twitter ID.  It’s quite enjoyable, and voting Republicans down is a great stress reliever.

Your participation remains 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.  For the years I have been writing, the discussion has been almost exclusively between you and me.  In the last couple of months, a lot more of you are replying to each other, and I could not not be more pleased.  Politics Plus exists to help end right-wing insanity.  Thank you all for all you do, here and elsewhere, to help make that happen.