Blog Analysis - 2024

Revisiting my favourite Torridonian balcony summit in 2024

I started blogging in 2009 after I retired, initially to inform my son of what was happening at home when he called in at internet cafes on his round-the-world trip. The blog has since grown into a log of all the Munros and Corbetts, some of my long-distance walks, holiday trips, eulogies for lost friends, places in the UK and Europe, and a record of political shenanigans over the past 15 years. There are 950 posts, and another 40 or so are waiting for completion as I search for old photos or find the right words to capture some thoughts and events. It is a timeline of happenings and thoughts with photos to prompt my memories as l drift into the era of the baby boomer eventide. 

For most of the past ten years, the traffic on the blog has been steady, with an average of 30 -50 hits per day, about 12,000 hits per annum. Two-thirds of those are from the UK, and another 20% from the USA, presumably mainly Google, keeping up with the latest postings. Other views were typically from France, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands and Ireland. Ukraine and Russia kept a close eye on the UK, but they have largely stopped since the onset of the Ukraine war. These last couple of years, traffic has skyrocketed, mainly from Singapore and Hong Kong. There is no indication of which posts they visit, and the presumption must be that they are bots. Israel visits also fall into this category, although they are at a far lower level. 

There have been over 260.000 hits, although in the last couple of years, bots have probably added 60,000 or so hits. I occasionally check what is being read, and there is no obvious pattern. It is an esoteric collection of my mumblings. Over the past year, when I  posted 70 times, I was pleased that the most-read 2024 posts covered all types of posts; the most-read dozen are listed in ranked order below.

1.  A grand day out in Edinburgh Local Government

2.  Buchaille Etive Beag  Munros 

3.  Lurg Mhor and Bidein a' Coire Sheasgaich  Munros

4.  Desolation Democracy   Politics

5.  What about local government? Local Government

6.  Sunday Morning on the wee Ben  Trossachs

7.  Blencathra   Lake District

8.  The Crow Trap  Home 

9.  Scottish Democracy: Time for a Reset   Politics

10. An Alphabetic Legacy of the Tory Years  Politics

11.  Universities: the facts about fiction  Economics

12.  London: Home of the Money Tree  London

Over the 15-year life of the blog, the all-time top four posts also cover a range of themes.

1.  The Top Forty Munros   Munros

2. GR20 Corsica  Long Walks

3. Strathclyde Regional Council, ashes to ashes  Local Government

4. Ronas Hill and da Lang Ayre     Shetland

These are followed by the West Highland Way, the Aonach Eagach, Vienna and a couple of Eulogies. 

Is it worth blogging? Well, yes, even if only for the selfish ability to revisit and remember the things and events that have captured my interest in Q4. The rest is for others to judge.

The long and lonely downhill road of retirement

Blog reaches 100,000 hits

The number of hits on the blog passed 100,000 this week. Not many compared to the celebrities and bloggers who seek to maximise clicks but a lot more than I ever expected for what is a diary of events, walks, holidays, places, people and politics. It is over 9 years since I started the blog. The purpose at the time was to post news from home so that our son could see what was happening as he travelled around the world. It was not open to wider circulation but limited to family and most of those posts have been deleted.

It was only after a post on completing the GR20 walk on Corsica that I made the blog available so that friends from around Europe whom we had met on the walk could see photos of the adventure. It began to receive a lot of hits and still remains the second most read post. I then decided to start logging my hill walks on the blog, people often asked me the best routes or the time required to climb the munros. I had already completed 4 rounds of the munros and I was starting a post-retirement round with the intention of finishing all the corbetts as well. I could have a complete record of all the the munros with photographs if I chose to walk on the better days. I had always kept a log of the walks but with five or six notebooks, it was becoming increasingly difficult to sort through them to find things. And the photographs were kept  separately in boxes or albums on the days that I had taken photographs

I began to get some positive feedback but I never intended the blog as a means of entering a dialogue. I became aware that the blog was a good way of capturing and saving memories so that they could be revisited when I was less active. I was getting 300-400 hits a month and the fact that the posts were read by others made me take more care than I would have done in a written log. It also encouraged me to take a camera with me on all walks. Writing a blog was a way of being more organised, it made me search for information about places I had been, read research on other subjects and learn about things that interested me. I began to include some hyperlinks.  They are a more useful reference than bookmarks because they are set in context. I could not always remember why I had saved bookmarks.

In 2011 I was working for a Chief Executive in reshaping an organisation with over 2000 employees. I persuaded him to set up a blog to inform the organisation about progress. It usually fell to me to write the fortnightly blog for him. It was short, just 500 words, and captured the main events of his meetings on behalf of the Council and changes taking place. It was slightly galling that the blog was getting more hits per month than my blog received in a year and I was posting at least twice as often but it was a captive audience. I eventually persuaded him to write it one week and he included in his post that he was getting a new puppy, a Border Terrier. It was a human interest story and went viral.

I came to the conclusion that what really mattered was what I wanted to have a record of and I no longer had any compulsion to try and increase the number of hits. I generally post 4 or 5 times a month and the number of hits has been fairly consistent over the past 4 or 5 years at 1000 to 1200 per month. I use it most days as a reference when I want to remember something, someone or someplace so it works for me. There are now 624 posts published including almost all the munros and about 70% of the corbetts. There are another 30 or so waiting to be posted when I get round to scanning in old photos or finding relevant research. 

I heard recently that Hamish McInnes, the famous climber and doyen of mountain rescue, had been hospitalised after losing his memory. It is heartening that he has recovered by reading the 14 books that he had published by way of restocking his memory. It makes me think that it is a pity the blog does not go back to those crazy days of youth but there again, maybe that would be too much for fading faculties to cope with.

Most posts seem to get 30 to 40 hits over the first month or so and then trickle along. The more specific ones such as the walks usually carry on to the hundreds, particularly the more remote hills such as Monadh Liath Northern Corbetts that rank higher on the search engines because there are few other postings or the most popular climbs such as Inaccessible Pinnacle. The biggest hit has been the Top Forty Munros, based on an article I wrote for The Great Outdoors Magazine. Apart from the walks it's Vienna that is the most read post. It is also consoling that some posts about people that I have known and respected are read regularly, presumably by family members. One post about my primary school teacher was used as the Eulogy at his funeral.

I read a post some years ago by a former colleague in his polymath like blog, The Bookish Explorer. He summarised the benefits of blogging with the critical eye and experience of a social scientist  These are captured below in one of his well crafted and researched pieces.

1. You’ll become a better thinker. Because the process of writing includes recording thoughts on paper, the blogging process makes you question what you thought you knew. You will delve deeper into the matters of your life and the worldview that shapes them. 2. You’ll become a better writer. – once, that is, you start to reread your material or get feedback which shows your text was ambiguous... 3. You’ll live a more intentional life. Once you start writing about your life and the thoughts that shape it, you’ll begin thinking more intentionally about who you are, who you are becoming, and whether you like what you see or not. And that just may be reason enough to get started. 4. You’ll develop an eye for meaningful things. By necessity, blogging requires a filter. It’s simply not possible to write about every event, every thought, and every happening in your life. Instead, blogging is a never-ending process of choosing to articulate the most meaningful events and the most important thoughts. This process of choice helps you develop an eye for meaningful things. 5. It’ll lead to healthier life habits (although my partner doesn’t agree!)!. Blogging requires time, devotion, commitment, and discipline. And just to be clear, those are all good things to embrace –they will help you get the most out of your days and life. 6. You’ll inspire others. Blogging not only changes your life, but it also changes the life of the reader. And because blogs are free for the audience and open to the public, on many levels, it is an act of giving. It is a selfless act of service to invest your time, energy, and worldview into a piece of writing and then offer it free to anybody who wants to read it. Others will find inspiration in your writing... and that’s a wonderful feeling. 7. You’ll become more well-rounded in your mindset. After all, blogging is an exercise in give-and-take. One of the greatest differences between blogging and traditional publishing is the opportunity for readers to offer input. As the blog’s writer, you introduce a topic that you feel is significant and meaningful. You take time to lay out a subject in the minds of your readers and offer your thoughts on the topic. Then, the readers get to respond. And often times, their responses in the comment section challenge us to take a new, fresh look at the very topic we thought was so important in the first place. 8. It’ll serve as a personal journal. It trains our minds to track life and articulate the changes we are experiencing. Your blog becomes a digital record of your life that is saved “in the cloud.” As a result, it can never be lost, stolen, or destroyed in a fire. 9. You’ll become more confident. Blogging will help you discover more confidence in your life. You will quickly realize that you do live an important life with a unique view and have something to offer others. The sharpened critical faculty regular blogging also brings to the reading of what others write. Henry James was spot on when he (apparently) said - “How can I know what I think until I read what I write?" You thought you knew something but, when you read back your own first effort at explanation, you immediately have questions– both of substance and style. But this also conveys itself very quickly to changes in the way that you read other people's material – you learn more and faster from a critical dialogue (even with yourself) than from passive reading. It is a fairly comprehensive set of reasons and not all of these will be applicable to most bloggers,  but it provides some cogent arguments to justify the time that blogging entails and sure beats trawling through a lot of dross on social media.

50,000 hits

I was surprised today to see that the blog has now had 50,000 hits. Not bad for what was meant to be a personal log of events, travels, hill walks and people I have known together with the odd polemic. It remains an increasingly useful diary of what I have been up to and the photographs certainly give further prompts to the memory.

The hits have increased year on year in the five years since they were first recorded in June 2010. Although I started the blog in 2009, the first year was restricted to friends and family; it was only after walking the GR20 in June 2010 were they open to a wider audience. This also meant that I have had to be more careful about more personal postings.

Year           Average monthly hits     Cumulative no. of blog posts

2010-2011                  412                                 117
2011-2012                  539                                 195
2012-2013                  993                                 266
2013-2014                  994                                 328
2014-2015                1112                                 387

Most hits are from the UK but an ever increasing share are from elsewhere. The current position is:

UK                66%
USA             16%
Russia           6%
Germany       5%
France           4%

Canada, Ukraine, Turkey, Netherlands, Romania are all on 1%

The most popular blogs are in descending order are:

GR20
Top Forty Munros
Ronas Hill and Da Lang Ayre
West Highland Way: Kingshouse to Fort William
Vienna
Roussillion
Granada
Mallorca
Bidean nam Bian
Chuckles

Many of the hill walking postings are slow burners but become widely read and they are well up the list along with the Shetland blogs. Visits to places like Sheffield, the Lake District and Cornwall together with activities in the immediate vicinity of home are surprisingly high. Three of the appreciations of former people who influenced me are high on the list as are half a dozen more political postings such as HS2 and Preston Bus Station also make the top forty hits.

But most of all it is a personal record of  events and as such will no doubt provide me with a source of enjoyment as the legs get weary and the memory begins to fade.

Twenty Five Thousand Hits

When I started this blog three and a bit years ago it was to provide some updates of what was I was doing during those empty days of retirement. It was mainly a record of places visited and things that were happening and restricted for immediate family and friends. Three years ago I opened the blog to all comers. Earlier today I had the twenty five thousandth hit. I am not sure whether to be pleased or not by this.

Prior to the blog I kept a written diary of holidays, a running log and word documents of all my hill walks. My photos were kept on various computers or on slides in shoe boxes. In short it was a nuisance trying to access these and certainly near impossible to bring together photos, diaries and logs. So the blog is a record of things that happen, a personal record but infused with the occasional reflection about politics or other events. What is certain is that things are easier to find and probably kept with more discipline than in the past.

The Blog has provided an outlet for other comment about people, politics, places and the occasional rant. Some of these have become widely read, others barely read. When the number of hits reached 25,000 today it surprised me, the growth in traffic this year to over 1000 hits every month has been unexpected. It is difficult to define any patterns to the hits but they can probably be summarised under three headings: volume of traffic, source of traffic, and popular postings.

Volume of traffic

This has only been measured since July 2010 when the Blog was opened to wider use.

• There were 368 hits in the first month but this was largely down to the GR20 post which has remained the most viewed post ever since.
• By the end of 2010 the blog was averaging 421 per month although this included a significant peak with the posts about my daughter's wedding. 
• There was no surprise that this fell 404 a month during the first six months of 2011 but there was a steady increase to 447 for the July to December months of 2011. For most of 2011 I was in Shetland and blogged about some of the wonderful landscapes and events there. 
• In 2012 I began to post about other events and to post my walks in the Scottish hills. The result was a substantial increase to 631 hits per month in the first six months and then to further increase to 786 per month for there second six months of 2012. 
• In 2013 there has been another significant step up with the average monthly hits averaging 1203 and the daily traffic averaging 40 or so hits.

Source of Traffic

The UK dominates with 90% of all hits. There were 44 regular visitors to the site during the last month. This has picked up in recent months which correlates to the increasing number of hits on the hill walking posts. After the UK, the USA has the next most visits to the site although it would seem that quite a few of these are by companies analysing the traffic. The same applies to Russia which is the next highest source of visits followed by Germany, France, Netherlands, Canada, Spain and Romania. There has been a notable increase in hits from China and other South East Asia countries in recent months although these are still well below 1% of all hits

Popular Postings

There have been 270 postings which have been made on a fairly consistent basis of 5 or 6 per month, I have never aspired to do a daily posting and only post when I feel inclined to describe an event or visit. What has become evident is the heavier traffic for posts on places visited like Vienna, Granada, Mallorca, Rousillion and Sheffield.  There are an increasing number of visits to the posts on hill walks now that they are reaching a critical mass, very often these are slow burners.  Just occasionally some posts go viral as with Bidean nam Bian when 6 people were killed in an avalanche or the floods of last November. Surprisingly a couple of posts on the Olympics also crop up in the top twenty posts listed below:

1. GR20 (Walking)                                        
2. Ronas Hill and da Lang Ayre (Shetland)  
3. Top 40 Munros (Hill Walking)                         
4. Vienna (Holiday)                                      
5. Granada (Holiday)                                    
6. Roussillion (Holiday)         
7. West Highland Way (Walking)
8. Wedding Day (Event)
9. Mallorca (Holiday)
10. Bidean nam Bian (Hill Walking)
11. Eagle of the Ninth (Film)
12. Lochnagar (Hill Walking)
13. Aberfoyle Deluge (Place/Event)
14. Inspiring a Generation (2012 Olympics)
15. Beinn Buidhe (Hill Walking)
16. South Shiel ridge (Hill Walking)
17. Thoughts of a Couch Potato (2012 Olympics)
18. Muckle Flugga (Shetland)
19. Up Helly Aa (Shetland)
20. Sheffield (Place)

The next batch which have all had over 100 hits include a number of postings with political comment, more hill walking and Shetland posts and a number of postings about people I have known. Several of these have generated a response and garnered new friends and old acquaintances. One post was used in a funeral Order of Service .

On a couple of occasions I have been targeted by bombers, usually based in Russia but also Latvia, who seem to select a particular post of no apparent significance to divert traffic elsewhere. As soon as I have reported this to Google these bombings have been stopped.

So I have no plans to significantly change the blog, although I am trying to find the most efficient way to included a link to a map for all the walks. Sixty to seventy posts a year seems about right and I now have a good personal record including photographs of the more memorable outings of the year, if it is of interest to others then that is a bonus.

One year of Blog Stats

By a strange quirk, it was exactly a year ago that I started to receive stats on the number of visits to this site.  And yesterday the page views  went through the 5000 mark.  I have earlier reviewed my first full year, a year of blogs, but I only had 4 months of stats to work with.  Since then the number of postings has doubled and the balance of postings has changed, it is more about places visited than politics or people but then I have been working a lot more over the past 8 months than in the previous year.

The posting on the GR20 walk continues to be the main driver with almost 20% of all page views and this attracts the biggest share of hits from around the world - it was published just a year ago.  The series on Shetland have also collectively reached this level although there are 21 postings at present.  After this postings on munro walks  and the lake district are well read and then there are a curious group of blogs such as Grandad, Elections, Waltzer Economy and 2011: the year of reckoning which often appear in the top ten postings for a month.  The recent holidays in Granada and Mallorca have been well read.  Every few weeks someone somewhere seems to find a couple of hours to read twenty or thirty postings but people typically dip into 1,2, or 3 postings.

Unsurprisingly the most hits came from the UK but this is now down to 67% , followed by the United States with 9%, and then France, Canada and Germany all on 2.5%.  Russia, the Netherlands, Italy and Romania also exceeded 1% of all hits and the number of site visits from India, China, New Zealand, Spain, Brazil and the Scandinavian countries are all increasing.

The monthly total of hits are surprisingly uniform at just over 400 a month.  The highest was in September 2010 during my daughter's wedding and it has only once fallen below 350 a month.  On a daily basis the highest number of hits was 82 following a reference to the blog in a promote Shetland publication.  It generally averages out at about 14 a day with Sunday being the day of least interest.

A Year of Blogs

It was exactly a year ago that I started a blog mainly to provide my son some pictures of Scotland as he circumnavigated the world.  My intention was to do about 4 blogs a month and it was restricted to the extended family.  I have since deleted some of the early blogs but I was pleased to see that I had managed 60 blogs in a year.  In April I opened the Blog to anyone partly because I was writing about wider issues or about activities involving others and I wanted to share the content with them.

The content has changed, originally it was about my activities in post retirement mode but then I started blogging about politics as the election approached and then some profiles of friends and ancestors.  In June I spent a couple of weeks trekking the GR20 and because I had kept timings and taken pictures I provided a log of the walk.  I also started to record my hillwalking trips which until now I had recorded as word documents that lay dormant. 

In June an update of the Blogging software provided an analytic tool which allowed me to see which blogs were being visited.  The number of hits per month has increased from 265 in June to 635 in September and there have been over 2000 hits since the analytics have been available. 79% of the audience are in the UK with 7% in the USA, 3% in Canada, 2% in France, Italy and the Netherlands and double figures of hits from  Russia, China, Slovenia, and Denmark.


By far the most visited has been the GR20 blog which usually reaches a double figure of hits everyday and scores 36% of all visits .  Eva's wedding comes next and then, somewhat surprisingly, the one on my Grandad. The blogs of hill walks usually achieve more than 30 hits.  Politics are less popular although the ones on News International, Waltzer Economy and Strange Days have been well read.  Travel logs and everyday outings, GR20 excepted, are the least visited but many of these were early blogs and were not openly available when first published. 


So what next, well I will probably continue.  I was told by an old acquaintance whom I bumped into earlier this week that they had started with the most recent and had systematically worked backwards and had really enjoyed the politics.  Conversely another political friend said her favourite was Little People. 

I have also registered a website which I intend to use to download my hillwalking files, partly as a response to the large number of hits on the few I have put on the blog.  I have over 450 logs of all my munro outings over twenty years with spreadsheets that tell the timings, length of walk, ascent and the routes which may sound dry but are very useful to like minded anoraks. Some of these are on an old applemac and others on various memory sticks. If I can find them and download them, match them with the thousands of old photos that I am slowly scanning in I will be able to provide at least 4 illustrated trips up every munro in Scotland.  The problem at the moment is that I am back to working 50 hours a week so I may lack the time to do these things but its the end of summer time tonight so who knows.