Five top blog posts

I'm always interested in stats, though that doesn't mean I always use them well, or understand their finer points. 

Blogger obligingly provides stats on a number of things related to my posts, and, out of curiosity today I checked the top blog posts of 'all time' from my blog. They're a real mixed bag, and there seems no rhyme nor reason as to why any of them should have been viewed so often. 

But for the record (because possibly they'll change at some point) here are the top five posts as of the 16th August, 2017. 

Top of the list is the Commonplace post which dates back to 2011, and is a bit of a riff on the word insurance, and the sorts of things that came up when I searched that word on my Evernote. A more random post you'd hardly imagine. Perhaps people search for the word insurance a lot! It's had twice as many views as number two on the list. 

Curiously enough, I hadn't checked this post for a while. I'd thought it related to an entirely different subject... 

Number two is Random thoughts on the Zirka Circus which goes back to 2010. This was a positive review of a small circus that was touring New Zealand at the time, and in fact has been back again at least twice since then. You'd think small circuses wouldn't be very impressive, but in fact they often include considerable talents (and these people really work for their money), and are very enjoyable. But then, I'm a circus fan from way back. Though I must say I miss the performing animals, even if that isn't a very PC thing to say anymore. 

Third on the list is Skinny ties, also from 2011, which seems a most unlikely subject to be viewed Twilight series, Robert Pattinson. It's been amongst the top five since it first appeared, pretty much. I wonder if it has to do with the photo that accompanies it, which may possibly be the actor from the Twilight movie, Robert Pattinson. 

Fourth on the list is Debating Compost, which dates way back to 2007. It's a brief piece arguing that cooked foods go just as well in composts as uncooked. Though someone's concern about this was that it encouraged rats. That's possible. We used to have a cat who dealt successfully with any rats and mice around the place, but when my daughter moved out, she took the cat with her - it did belong to her after all. During the course of the move the cat walked out the door of the new house and vanished for a couple of months. The daft thing was living at the park just down the road and was being occasionally fed by some kind person who eventually took it to the Vet. The cat had been microchipped, so the Vet was able to identify my daughter as the owner. 

And fifth is Fat amplification, the most recent of the bunch, from 2016. It's merely a bit of chat about the joys and woes of amplification of musical instruments, particularly in a church setting. Maybe the problem is widespread!

Popular post

I have a bit of a thing about stats. I'm not trained as a statistician, but I've done quite a bit of reading in the subject, and also worked in a job late in my working life that involved some stats. But apart from the work angle I've always enjoyed finding out what the stats are about all manner of subjects - and checking the original stats have been correctly interpreted.

That's the wider view: just now I was having a look at the stats on this blog, and in particular which post has had the most visits since it first appeared. It turns out to be one that was written on 13th February, 2011, called Commonplace Post. It's fairly random, taking as its topic insurance and riffing on about the topic by using a few paragraphs I'd found in my Evernote file.

The interesting thing is that this post has had more than three times as many visits as the next most popular post. At this point that's 9923 to 3295. Nearly ten thousand visits to that post alone. That seems extraordinary for something as random as this. Check it out, you'll see what I mean.

And while we're on lists...

What you see below is a copy of the Popular Posts from this blog, as at the 9th March, 2014. Yet there's something rather strange about this. These posts show up almost all the time, as though they were continually being viewed. The reality is somewhat different. When I look at the stats for yesterday, which should give us some indication as to popularity, only one of these posts appears, and that's the first. Buechner on Marriage is also there, but well down the list. It seems to me that these 'popular posts' get up on the list at some point and then just stay there.  Here's yesterday's list of top five posts, all but the first being quite recent arrivals.

Commonplace post 13 Feb 2011,	62
Wimpy keyboards 8 Mar 2014,	34
Irritation in #gigatowndunedin 8 Mar 2014,	31
Making mugs of us all 8 Mar 2014,	17
The Best Offer 7 Mar 2014,	17

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  Commonplace post

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  Random thoughts on the Zirka Circus

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Robert Nye, poem and song

Still working my way along on the composing front. In preparation for the concert I'd like to do at some point in the next year, I've now got four piano pieces ready (all four of which are going to be played at a concert presented by someone else next weekend), and three songs. Not a large body of work as yet, but it's a beginning. Make that four songs - I wrote another the other day which isn't part of the group of songs I'm working on.
I'd been reading Alec Guinness' A Commonplace Book, which was published posthumously, and came across a poem by Robert Nye, called The Cockerel. The first time I read it, an approach to making it into a song came straight into my head, and stuck there - something that's rather unusual with poems, for me. So the tune that I've written is pretty close to my original idea, though of course it's been shifted around a bit to make it singable! It's the sort of song my friend Brent Read would do well, so I'll have to suggest it to him.
It would be great to think that all this writing would increase the amount in my savings account, but on the basis of the income from my last concert, I can't see that happening in a hurry. Admittedly I made a profit from my last concert, which was a nice surprise, but it was hardly enough to keep me functioning without doing real work.