As narcissistic as it may be, I have to admit that I do check my statistics page once or twice a week. I'm curious about the people who read this blog, after all; I don't get many comments, so it's nice to be able to get at least some kind of an idea of what sort of people read what I write.
First of all, not a lot of people read this blog. Generally, I only get a couple hundred pageviews per month. I'm not complaining, mind you; when I started this blog in 2009, I never expected that I'd gain a large following, and I never set out to do so. And I know that I don't update nearly often enough for my work to really get noticed. All I wanted to do was write about my experiences with my very decidedly unorthodox spiritual path, hoping that these reflections, meditations, rants, ramblings, and other assorted collections of words would prove to be useful, or at least interesting, to whoever finds them.
But one thing that astounds me is the sheer diversity of the countries where this blog has been viewed. By far, most of my pageviews come from Canada and the U.S., which makes sense both because of where I live and the language in which I write, but I've also gotten lots of pageviews from Germany, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Poland, and the Netherlands. (That last one especially pleases me; I'm about a quarter Dutch.) People from Australia, New Zealand, France, Sweden, Brazil, Russia, Pakistan, and even Israel have paid me a virtual visit. I've had a few pageviews from Egypt, China, and Latvia, and once even had a visitor from the United Arab Emirates. I've had visitors from many other countries as well (and if you come from one of the ones I haven't mentioned, and you've visited my blog before, I apologize* for having left you out). Unless a lot of my readers are frequent users of Tor or other such privacy-preserving software and services, the possibility of which I am not at all going to discount, that's at least one visit from every continent but Antarctica, which to this Canadian seems pretty cool, to say the least.
I'm not entirely sure how everybody finds this blog, of course, but I also get some fairly interesting search terms. I get a lot of on-topic search terms, of course; most people who come here via search engine (usually some variety of Google, by the way, though a few others are represented fairly well, too) get here by searching for something involving some variation on "Christo-Pagan" (and a fair few have actually gotten here by doing a search for the URL, which I find a bit odd), but I've been keeping track of some of the weirder search terms that have come up, such as:
easy pagan sex: Er, I'm not that type of blogger. (Not that there's anything wrong with that; some of my favourite blogs for occasional reading, none of which are particularly work-safe, include Figleaf's Real Adult Sex, The Pervocracy, and Hey Epiphora.) And although I don't buy in to the "purity myth," I'm not exactly easy, either.
my fat wife: I have no idea how anyone could possibly have found my blog with this search term.
crochet pagan blog homestead: This one almost makes sense, since I've mentioned my fondness for this particular textile art a few times, but I don't think I've ever actually written the word "homestead" on this blog before today. If this was a search for another site featuring Pagan-themed crochet projects, though, I would absolutely love to have the link!
conniving sly cunning women get their men: Did this come from the sarcastic responses to dating rules post? Because if it didn't, there's no logical reason why my blog should've popped up in response to this one, either.
meditations for people that hate oa: What the heck is an "OA"?
christopagan spells to keep bad neighbors away: I don't share spells. Well, unless they're silly spells, anyway. I just don't normally do anything that could even remotely resemble spells. Well, except for Reiki. And cooking. (My potion for the relief of an empty stomach, better known as beef vegetable soup, is particularly delicious, I'm pleased to say.) And the occasional gaze into my crystal ball. And a ritual now and then. :)
shipwreckcentral offline: By the time the search results page would get to me, I think it's safe to say that any useful information about the regrettable demise of such a fantastic website would have been long since exhausted.
w. w. j. d. bracelets: Probably the result of having written a shorter-than-usual rant a few months ago about why WWJD bracelets bother me. But again, I'm surprised that someone spent so much time paging through so many search results that they ended up taking a look at what I had to say on the matter. :)
So, there you are: a quick look at what I've been seeing when I look at my blog stats. Even if it's not particularly interesting to you, I'm rather amused by some of it. :)
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*It occurs to me that I've just done something that's quintessentially Canadian. Here in Canada, it could be said that we have two national pastimes: hockey and apologizing (probably as a result of our frequently stereotypical emphasis on the necessity of being polite). I'm an absolute klutz on skates, so perhaps it's just as well that I chose the other one. ;)
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