Monthly Report for September 2011

In September, Politics Plus performed very well. Uniques and visits were up, the third highest this year.  Page views, hits and bandwidth were all time record highs. 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.

Here are our basic stats:

In addition we also had 189,927 page views, 268,069 hits and and 8.98 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 October 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 232 seconds last month:

Number of visits: 45,606 – Average: 211 s	Number of visits	Percent
0s-30s	37,754	82.7 %
30s-2mn	2,111	4.6 %
2mn-5mn	1,170	2.5 %
5mn-15mn	1,433	3.1 %
15mn-30mn	992	2.1 %
30mn-1h	1,369	3 %
1h+	777	1.7 %

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

Search engine referrals were up, except for Stumbleupon.

22 different referring search engines	Pages	Percent	Hits	Percent
Stumbleupon (Social Bookmark)	5472	48.2 %	6,536	44 %
Google	5088	44.8 %	7,210	48.5 %
Microsoft MSN Search	286	2.5 %	286	1.9 %
Yahoo!	164	1.4 %	258	1.7 %
Microsoft Bing	120	1 %	175	1.1 %
AOL	51	0.4 %	51	0.3 %
Microsoft Windows Live	44	0.3 %	65	0.4 %
Google (Images)	42	0.3 %	65	0.4 %
Unknown search engines	41	0.3 %	42	0.2 %
Ask	21	0.1 %	21	0.1 %
Yandex	8	0 %	28	0.1 %
MyWebSearch	4	0 %	10	0 %
Dogpile	2	0 %	3	0 %
Virgilio	2	0 %	3	0 %
Earth Link	1	0 %	1	0 %
MetaCrawler (Metamoteur)	1	0 %	1	0 %
WebCrawler	1	0 %	1	0 %
Baidu	1	0 %	3	0 %
Kvasir	1	0 %	1	0 %
Scroogle	1	0 %	1	0 %
Mamma			30	0.2 %
Go.com			51	0.3 %

Our top five non-blog referrers are:

http://www.reddit.com/               9,450+

http://www.care2.com/               4,650+

http://www.buzzflash.net/            2,500+

http://www.jabberwonk.com/           850+

http://www.facebook.com/               850+

Our top 15 blog referrers are:

http://jbm479.wordpress.com/

http://www.randirhodes.com/main.html

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

http://parsleyspics.blogspot.com/

http://themanwhowalksalonewalksfaster.blogspot.com/

http://synapticstew.com/

http://infidel753.blogspot.com/

http://whohijackedourcountry.blogspot.com/

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

http://jackjodell53.wordpress.com/

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

http://reconstitution.us/rcnew/

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

http://katieschwartz.com/

http://bildungblog.blogspot.com/

http://carolinaparrothead.blogspot.com/

http://themoderatevoice.com/

There are extras, because there was a three way 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 30th.  Here they are:

Lynn Squance (125)

Patty (89)

Phyllis (64)

SoINeedAName (57)

lee (46)

Jerry Critter (39)

Memphis Johnny (38)

Jack Jodell (36)

TWM (36)

Lisa G. (33)

AnnH (25)

Blue (14)

Tom (14)

Maria (13)

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

Technorati makes little sense again this month.  Our performance was up, but our ratings remained the same, except that they restored our World rating for reasons unknown.   We are still B list globally, but A list in both of our intended categories.  This site’s authorities across Technorati:

We have 471,917 links on other websites, down from 507,580 last month.

We have 2,812 articles and 24,o83 comments, as of midnight 10/1.

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 e mail address here or on any WordPress blog (several others too), that image will be your avatar.

We have a 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.  Have any of you uses this and how do you like it?

I replaced the standard comment editor with a full featured graphic editor that give you a wide range of ways you can express yourselves, including pictures.  Sadly, I learned yesterday that it conflicts with our smiley button.  If I cannot find a compatible add-in, I’ll post a separate page listing text shortcuts for smilies that you can keep open in a different tab.  Please be patient.  I’ll do it as soon as time permits.

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 have even written 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.