Stats

Have any of you seen The Social Network? I highly recommend it. Not only because I am just a teeny tiny bit of a computer nerd, but as I'm sure you've heard by now, it's just a really really good movie.I'll let you form your own opinions, but the one thing that stood out to me as I watched the film was a scene where one of the characters said to Mark Zuckerberg, "you got 22,000 hits in two hours? Wow."And all the computer-nerd-blogger in me could think was: Wow.

A "hit," or pageview, is recorded anytime someone downloads your page. For instance, since you are reading this post, you have generated one hiton this page.When I first started blogging, there wasn't an easy way to see how much traffic your site was getting. But then Bloggerreleased a new feature called Stats. It's totally awesome. Here is what I see when I go to my stats page:

I can see how many visits I've had in a week (or day,month, etc.)

which posts are getting the most hits:

where my traffic is coming from (how people are finding me, i.e., did you find me through Google, my website, facebook, or another blog?)

I can also see what part of the world my readers are from, and what operating system they use:

How cool is that? What's up, Pakistan! Hello, China! Cheers, UK! Bon Jour, France! Slovenia? Who would've thought?? Malaysia? Come on! And of course my buddies up north, eh?The thing I love about stats is that it tells me that all is not lost. I am not alone. My parents are not the only ones reading my blog (hi guys!) And it propels me to do more. It's kind of like crack. I see some hits, and I want to see more. So I keep writing.So thanks to everyone out there in the world who wanders onto my blog. I hope you like it. I hope you find it worthwhile to come back. And I hope you tell your friends about it.I may not be a computer engineer on a college campus getting 22,000 hits in two hours, but I am totally psyched to see this when I open my stats page:

Yay!! We hit the 1,000 mark!

Thank you.