BelperStuff reaches 10,000 views today
This blog started on 23rd April 2015 .......... 226 days ago. The motivation to create BelperStuff was to supply a commentary for the national, borough and town council elections that were to be held on the 7th May ......... from a Labour Party perspective. Straight away there was an attempt to show how decisions made in Westminster affect local life and the format of viewing the world from the prism of a small town in Derbyshire emerged. It has astonished me that BelperStuff has achieved an average of 40 views per day.There have been 75 posts which (yes I've taken my socks off so this is easy), which means that posts have averaged 133 views. Obviously it's not that simple as the front page of the blog can show a number of posts (today, as I write this, there are 7 on the front page) which can be read by merely scanning down. Posts read by this method do not show up in the statistics so the average views of posts is probably much higher.
Subjects dealt with have tended to follow what is in the news but often a few days after mainstream media headlines to give a bit more background information or to help publicise research that may be somewhat obscure (my favourite is the Berkeley College paper into the psychology of republican sympathisers - Is there a cure for conservatism). On some issues BelperStuff has been in the lead and I am thinking of King Street buses and local poverty statistics.
A feature of BelperStuff is that it does not just link to other people's work but also posts original research undertaken by the editorial team. This is very often the only way to understand the reality of life that is masked by the silky words of politicians and the distortions of a biased media.
Data snapshots
I have taken snapshots of the usage data that is provided to blog authors. This shows a strong following in the States, perhaps not so surprising but some of the other countries are unexpected. There were minimal views in Russia at first but a reference in a post to the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) resulted in 33 views in one day. I regret not making a tally of all the other countries where people have viewed the blog but the first list shows only the top ten. Missing are views such as 33 in China and even a couple in North Korea (amongst- easily - 30 other countries) but perhaps the saddest was the lone reader in Aruba, (a small island in the Caribbean just off the coast of Venezuela). I imagine this to be a holidaymaker who has had enough of the sunkissed beaches and cobalt blue seas but craves a bit of news about Belper Town Council. Sad if true. (If you are that person please post a comment and explain yourself).Other statistics available to a blogmeister are the most popular posts but here the list is limited to the top five. It is evident that specific posts about Belper gain the highest readership, perhaps not so surprising given the name of the blog:
Posts
Now some stuff for the real nerds
Watching the daily view count it is very apparent that European and UK readers are using Chrome whilst in the US there is a tendency towards Internet Explorer. The views by iPad, iPhone or Android devices seem to be evenly spread over the planet.
So, the next 10,000 ................
........... will be more of the same. Posts are restricted to at most 2 per week to avoid overburdening the readership as they are already assailed with stuff from right, left and centre. Left to my own choice BelperStuff would concentrate on the environment. public transport and poverty ........ global, national and local ................ but there are so many interesting topics that just keep cropping up. Perhaps it's for the best to just carry on in the same vein, after all, an average of 40 views a day to read the musings of an old fart like me is very gratifying.
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