My Blog Year in Review

So 2012 is no longer.  It seemed to fly by in our household.  It was also a year filled with a lot of tragedy on the national level and also right in my back yard (Geeseytown is about 7 miles from my house).  I was listening to the year in review on the radio, and the number of mass shootings and Superstorm Sandy and all of the lost lives was tough to listen to.  I’m an optimist, a dreamer, a person who sees the glass half full, drinks it, and then fills it back up.  Let’s hope 2013 is a happier, healthier, safer year for everyone.

But looking back at a microcosm of 2012, my blog, I just have a few observations to share.  I came in just a hair below 3000 hits over the course of the year, although I have no statistics from when I switched from WordPress to Blogger, so I’m sure it was quite a bit more.  Not bad for some unknown, shaggy-bearded guy from the middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania (that’s Altoona, Pennsylvania, by the way, and no I’m not saying I dislike the city—I obviously like it enough to keep living here—just that few people outside of Pennsylvania have ever even heard of it).  But yeah, people actually are paying attention to what I have to say, and for those of you who do, THANK YOU!

I have to chuckle at the most popular posts from my blog.  Overwhelmingly landing at number one was my post on the PSU scandal—I think less about the content and mostly because people liked the PSU emblem I included in the post.  The second one, which has me just shaking my head, is the post regarding why people hate Leann Rimes.  In that post I dissected how people were too obsessed with celebrities, and the fact that dozens upon dozens of people read that post is proof enough.  More on that in a second.  Third was a post on people who love drama, fourth was my post last month on weight loss, and fifth was a post on weird bodily stuff that included a snippet on bangs covering one eye being the cause of a lazy eye (this rumor must have a lot of teens and twenty-somethings worried for it to be clicked on so much!)  The one post I thought would have garnered the most attention, labeled “I Won the Powerball!!!!”, came in eighth—just behind “What Happened to Colored Toilet Paper.”  That’s a bit comforting to know that people care about beige and blue toilet paper just about as much as me winning hundreds of millions of dollars in the lottery (which I did NOT, by the way, in case you didn’t read that post).

My blog stats also include lists of keywords that people used to find my blog.  The top key words were “penn state”, so that’s not surprising.  Next was my actual URL: rastrohman.blogspot.com.  Amazingly, four of the remaining eight related to Leann Rimes: "why do people hate leann rimes", "hate leann rimes", "I hate leann rimes", "lean rimes hated".  By this logic, if I (or any other blogger) just included the most hated celebrity names in their post titles, we’d have some rather successful (albeit shameful) blogs.  I guess people still hate Leann Rimes though.  Seriously read that post (dated August 1, 2012)!

Another surprising stat was the audience.  I had readers from 10 different countries and every state in the U.S., but I was a little shocked to see that Firefox was the top browser used (32%).  IE came in second at 25%, Chrome—what I use—came in third at 17%, Safari fourth at 12%, and Opera fifth at 6%.  Of the operating systems, Windows was the top at 68%, Mac second at 11%, iOS third at 8%, Linux fourth at 5%, and Android fifth at 2%.  Somehow I guess I imagined iOS and Android being higher up there, but I guess people are still using desktop computers and laptops more than I had suspected.

I didn’t make much money from my blog, but that’s not really why I’m doing it.  Still, I pulled in $3.04 since June.  If you want to add to my piggy bank, feel free to click on the ad links on the side.  Even if you close the page immediately after clicking on the links, each click gives me some extra pennies that I’ll then end up spending in Toys R Us on my two boys.

Finally, and the main reason I blog, my 2012 novel Terminal Restraint had 37 page views since I posted the page in early October.  I’ve had slightly more downloads and previews, but I just have to say that this was my best novel to date, and people are taking notice.  It’s not too scary and not vulgar at all, but it does touch upon some taboo subjects.  It’s a great story though, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, please do so!

That's it for 2012!  I'll keep on entertaining in 2013!