The First Decade, in Statistics

We were vacationing on Vancouver Island when Confessions of a Train Geek turned 10. I totally missed it. I guess that's good, focusing on vacation instead of on my blog...

My first post was on July 9, 2005. As my wife just pointed out, we were on vacation then, too, returning from visiting Quebec and Montreal. I guess I made my first post in a hotel room in Edmundston, NB!

I celebrated post #2500 just two months ago and reminisced then, so it seems redundant to go over it again. Instead, I'll provide statistics! Whee!

I only have statistics from May 2010 to now in Blogger, so my statistics are really only for the last 5 years.

In the last 5 years, this blog had 851,460 page views. I'd like to double that to account for lifetime page views but I'm sure it was less than that in the first 5!

My most popular post by far is January 2015's Instagram for Railfans, with a distant second being a post about Thomas the Tank Engine coming to Canada in 2013.

Google and my own Traingeek.ca account for the majority of referrals, with Eric Gagnon's Trackside Treasure providing the top blog referrals. Google eclipses Bing and Yahoo! in referrals by more than 10 to 1! Let's not talk about AltaVista...

Several variants of "train" and "geek" are the top search terms, with "via derailment", "grain elevator", "winnipeg" and "CN train" rounding out the top 10.

Canada is obviously the top traffic source, but the US is not far behind; France, China and Germany fill out the top 5 countries visiting this blog. I honestly would have expected the UK to rank higher but it's #6 on the list.

Internet Explorer is the top browser, followed by Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Mobile and search browsers follow. Recent stats show that IE has fallen way behind so I think the Internet Explorer hits were from a few years ago before the rise of Chrome.

This one is not a surprise - most visitors use Windows, with Mac users a distant second. However, if you look at the last month, mobile devices are used by a pretty significant percentage of my readers.

I have 1817 comments on my blog. The oldest is a comment on this post. Who knows - maybe Chris McMahon was my first reader! ;)

For those of you who read to the end, I salute you! Thanks for reading, as always.