Mystery readers

Lately, my WordPress statistics have been all over the place. As I’ve said many times before, I don’t fully ‘get’ them. Well. I get them, but I don’t get what drives them. Some days I get 20 views, whereas on other days, I get more than 100. It’s independent of time of posting or day of the week. Some days just work, others don’t. Boring posts get great visitation, whereas my absolute gems gather dust in the corner of forgotten posts. It’s just weird.

One thing I have noticed is that recently, pretty much to the day of reachingy 365th daily post, my average number of likes went up two- to threefold, as if I had suddenly proven myself to be good enough for a like. I don’t know what happened. Thanks though! I appreciate the love (please tell me you’re not bots in the comments!).

Sadly, I cannot see who’s reading my posts. I would really love to know though. All I see is a list of countries of origin, and a number of views from each one of them. Surprisingly, Germany lately always leads, whereas my home country of the Netherlands is slowly sinking to the bottom of the list lately. I don’t know what to think of this, perhaps I’m gaining popularity in Germany – which is of course good, since I live there – but on the other hand, am I losing my Dutch friends?

I have also always wondered why some days I have three times as many views as visitors. I figured that sometimes someone might read back one or two older posts, but I wouldn’t expect that anyone reads back twenty or more. Well… Today I figured out that I have at least one of those.

Yesterday, I had 23 reads from Croatia. Now, I have Croatians visit every now and then, but they never lead the stats boards. Nope, it’s pretty clear that something else is going on. I’m currently IN Croatia. Now, I rarely read back my old posts, so this surely isn’t me… However, I’m writing this during our family road trip as I put my son to bed in our camper’s high-roof. I suspect my wife is sometimes getting extremely bored, about one meter below me on the ‘ground floor’ of the camper. What better ways to spend a bored hour than by reading my blog? (I knew of course that Heike reads my blog, but wasn’t aware of her batching procedure. I naively thought she would be reading every post right away, but I was wrong…)

I see you Heike… (Oh, and I’ll be down in a minute!)