Friday 21 September 2012

Blog milestone and "pelagic" birding in Ontario

Sometime this afternoon/early evening, my blog will roll over the 100,000 pageviews mark! Woohoo! Thanks everyone for reading along :)

I started it in May, 2011 and never thought it would become that popular...but I guess doing a big year will create some interest in the blog. Some fun facts:

-May 2012 was my most popular month, with 12,714 page views (though September 2012 is on pace to reach about 14,000). My first full month, June 2011, had only 666 page views in comparison!

-I have made 220 posts and there are 407 total comments (though probably a third of the comments are from me)

-My most popular post of all time is called "Photos of all the snakes of Ontario, part 1", and my second most popular post is "Mountain Bluebird Photo", not far behind. A lot of the traffic on my blog is from people looking for information about reptiles in Ontario. The 3 posts in the series I haven't finished about Ontario's snakes are 3 out of 5 most popular posts I have done on this blog. Not something I expected!

-Rounding out the top 10 in most popular posts are "Fish Crow video from Fort Erie", "Dickcissels and car troubles", "Birthday grebe", "Crazy day with two year birds", "Great Gray Owl in Kingsville", and "The next 20 birds added to the Ontario list".

-The top referring site to my blog (a.k.a. where other people link to it from) is of course, Google. Second though goes to Blake Mann's blog, "Burg Birder". Thanks Blake! Honourable mentions go to Brandon Holden's blog and Dwayne Murphy's blog.

-most people who read this blog do so in Canada and the US, however there is a strange amount of viewership who hail from Switzerland, Russia, Belgium, and Sweden.

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Enough of that...onto some birding news!
Tomorrow I am going on a 5 hour "pelagic" trip out of Hamilton into Lake Ontario with several other birders. I've been looking forward to it for quite some time! I have no idea how successful it will be - perhaps it will be a bust. But I'm hoping that if there is a shearwater or petrel somewhere on western Lake Ontario, we will be able to entice it to come close to the boat. Seriously though, I would be very happy if I could get Red Phalarope or Black-legged Kittiwake for the yearlist on this trip. Full recap coming tomorrow night.

2 comments:

Blake A. Mann said...

And, you are my top referring site!
Interesting to look at the Stats. There are dozens of people that follow my blog, but my pageviews don't reach your totals.
Have fun on the boat.

dwaynejava said...

Josh, thanks for the mention. Your blog and Blakes are my top referrers as well (after google searches). 12,000 page views per month is crazy. My blog might get 2,000 views on a good month comparatively. Good luck on the Pelagic!