Blog Statistics for May

Well, using the simple counter that was added back on 24 March 2005, there have been 565 visits to Virtual High School Meanderings during the month of May. This brings the total number of visits since this counter was added to 1102.

After being down for about 24 hours at the beginning of the month, the Geoloc feature has recorded visits from Portugal, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Ukraine, South Africa, Iran, India, the Philippines and Japan since the beginning of May.

This is added to the visitors from Canada, the United States, Venezuela, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Estonia, Turkey, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand that dropped by in April, bringing us to a grand total of twenty-five different countries.

I came across another statistics feature near the beginning of the month (about the same time the Geoloc tool was down actually), so the StatCounter was added on the evening of 04 May 2005. In addition to simple hits to the page (as the initial counter registers), this tool actually tracks individual visits, repeat visits, specific IPs that have visited; it is really quite cool. Anyway, since it was added there have been:

• 393 page loads from 250 unique visitors, 182 of which were first time visitors and 68 were return visitors;
• the most popular entries have been Teaching in a Virtual High School, Do Today's Students Think Differently?, Virtual High School for North Carolina?, Who Are Virtual Schools For?, and Online Learning for Who? (in that order);
• traffic from search engines include 86.96% from Google, 8.70% from Technorati, and 4.35% from MSN;
• there are also a fair number of people coming from Teaching and Developing Online (thanks Darren); and finally
• of the last on hundred visitors to this blog, 35 stayed for less than 5 seconds, 7 stayed for 30 seconds to 5 minutes, 3 stayed for 5 to 20 minutes, 1 stayed for 20 minutes to an hour and 2 stayed for longer than an hour.

The one limitation of this StatCounter is that you only get a log of the really good stats for the last 100 visitors, so the statistics on popular pages, search engines and other sources that people came to the site from, length of stay, country, state/province, city and ISP of visitors. To get more you have to pay for the service, which if tracking traffic was important to you, I'd say it would be well worth the money.

Anyway, those are some of the statistics for this blog over the past month. I'll be back again at the end of June with another update.