The little blog that could

This is for you regular visitors to the New Hope Connection blog. Our blog is hosted by Google's Blogger.com, and one of the free services Google provides is an "analytics" program through which you can track how many visitors come to your site. Have you ever wondered how many others read these musings?

I've been posting on this blog since December 27, 2006 (the first few months were hosted on our church website), but a month and a half ago I finally figured out the analytics thing, and I've been fascinated by the information. So here are a few stats about the last 45 days:

- Total visits to the site: 844
- Number of unique visitors: 421
- Lowest number of visits in a day: 9 (12-25-08 and 12-30-08)
- Highest number of visits in a day: 34 (1-1-08)
- Number of visits from search engines: 171
- Number of countries represented: 39(!)

Many of the search engine visits came from people looking for info about two songs that I posted about: "How Many Kings" which I sang in church on December 16th (74 hits), and "As Long As I Have You" which we've been singing since the summer (42 hits). Several searches also have been done on names of people in our church (or names identical to people in our church), including Dewey and me as well as 6 other New Hopers. (I'll email you if you're one of them so the paranoids among you can rest easy!) :)

There have been a few odd searches that led people to the New Hope Connection, including:
- sermon joke hope
- woman and dog joke
- what to say to thank for lunch
- sermons free refills
- (and my favorite) new hope hippie

I was floored by the fact that visits have come from 39 different countries! I like to put lots of pictures on the blog, and many of these international visits come from people searching for images through Google's image search (I have no idea what kind of pictures they're looking for, it doesn't tell me).

Anyway, if you're a regular visitor to the New Hope Connection, thanks so much for checking in. As it says in the header above, I hope that this blog will "give you a smile, stimulate you spiritually, and most of all help you feel connected to what's going on in our New Hope community." I always enjoy getting comments, so please feel free to click the "comments" link at the foot of each post and let me know your thoughts!