Stats

People ask "where do you get those stats?", in reference to the last entry <<<.

If you have an Open Diary, you can see most of these kind of stats on your own front page – how many entries, what kinds they are and OD will give you monthly, and yearly stats.

The picture stats come from my Photo bucket account – I’ve been there since 2004 too, and have uploaded 9054 pictures to the account, I was, for the first couple of years, a "free account" holder, but became a "Pro" account holder when I used up the amount of space they then gave to "free" accounts. $25.00 a year seems like an ok price to pay. OD used to cost me something every year, as a "plus" member, but a few years ago, I bought a "lifetime membership – no more yearly expense. THAT was worth it to me too, but even better, make that one-time payment and don’t ever worry about it again – what a deal.

An Australian reader who I don’t hear from anymore – OD people do tend to come and go – told me about Site meter back in 2006, when I complained about the lack of readership of my diary, after I had written something meaningful to me. I was using notes to judge how much my stuff had been looked at, and a couple of notes on something important to me depressed me – "what, no one’s looking? Waaaaaa". She told me about Site meter, which, like everywhere else, it seems, has free and paid accounts. The free version gives me way more stats than I need – the last 100 hits, for example, which ISP they use (sometimes), which country, sometimes, and how long they looked, where they came from and where they went afterwards – sometimes. Most of the times, really, and it’s really gratifying to see that I have a lot of readers – far more than the 33,372 notes I’ve gotten, some of which I’ve written myself.

Stats can be impressive, yes? "How to lie with statistics" was a book I read in Jr. High, in the 70’s, not that any of mine are lies, but the book made the point that you can sound impressive with bullshit stats as well as legitimate ones.

Something to remember in Election years.

Anyway, it’s been fun writing and posting pictures here, and it’s fun sharing statistics with you – and of course, you are part of my fun statistics too, and ya know,a lot of the reason any of them exist is because of you – otherwise, it would just be a kind of mental online masturbation, right?

*****