Stats & Students

Among the many annoyances delivered by Blogger's new interface or whatever it is, there are these numbers that keep showing up by my posts. I thought they were comments at first, but I finally figured out tonight that they are page view counts. Here's a screen shot of my PBW posts dashboard, which shows my Flea Market Ten post (and you can click on the image to see a larger version):



Now, according to Blogger the post has had 197 page views. The odd thing is that my Flickr account, which hosts the little slideshow I put in the post, also tracks how many times it's been viewed, which as of this moment is 2,112 times.

Whenever I post images on Flickr but don't link or embed them anywhere else I get zero traffic, so I feel certain that the 2,112 views had to come from visitors to the blog. Perhaps they used one of those feed things people employ to read blogs that maybe Blogger can't track, but I'm really not sure. Anyway, I thought I'd mention this for those of you on Blogger who are taking those page view stats as accurate -- I don't think they are.

One more recent development I should probably mention: certain writing-related posts here at PBW are now being assigned to university students for reference and study (Darlene, stop laughing.) Since we already have plenty of visitors who are students this shouldn't be a problem, but I thought my regulars should know in the event they start asking a lot of questions in comments (which I will handle, but you all are welcome to join in with any help you want to offer.)