In my pre-Peace Corps life, I worked in the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Having started as administrative support, I had my hands in a lot of things involved in keeping the department running smoothly. The job was a good fit for me because I’d always been interested in data and, even if I didn’t always understand every detail, I could understand the big picture. Plus, I’d gotten an A in my statistics course at San Diego City College. (That’s doubly impressive because it was a condensed summer course.) We had a good team and I know some of them are reading this and to them I want to say, Hello!
In honor of my statistician friends, DFCI friends, and others like me who’ve long been interested in how things break down, I’m devoting this blog entry to the statistics of my blog. For the non-statisticians, consider this a behind-the-scenes entry.
Launch date: 30 APR 2012
Number of posts: 48
Number of comments: 205
Most comments award goes to: Cousin Priscilla, whom I’ve mentioned before, and who remains as awesome as ever.
Number of Spam comments I’ve had to delete: 5,253. Sounds unmanageable, but the site identifies them, and I can delete batches at a time.
Number of views: 7,844
Date with highest number of views: 22 MAY 2012, 154 views! This was entirely due to an article that appeared that day on Boston.com about my love affair with Hubway that would be cut short by my move to Mongolia. The article included a link to the blog.
Number of people who’ve subscribed via email: 19. The first was quite a surprise, Justin from high school. How are you, buddy? The rest are a blend of family, one-time work colleagues, Peace Corps people, and a handful I have no idea who they are. Well, you are all welcome to these pages.
Number of blog followers: 35. These are people who have their own blog, and their blog follows my blog. It’s like our blogs are friends with each other. Most of these are unknown to me; a handful are fellow PCVs.
Number of countries from which people have accessed my blog: 66 countries from 6 continents!
Number of countries with 10+ views: 23
It’s no surprise that the US has had the most visitors. It also makes sense that Mongolia has the second most, since 1) I’ve met a lot of people since I came here, and 2) we are required to give our blog addresses to Peace Corps staff so they can monitor what we put out there. Third place goes to the tiny country of Singapore, where my college roommate lives. Some of the clicks have come from links on her blog. And 5th place goes to Greece, where Anna, my high school bestie, is checking in with my goings-on.
The tenth most visited country was The Netherlands, which deserves mention because one day I got a postcard from Amsterdam from I guy I’ve never met, who found me via my blog and decided to reach out. Thanks, Mike! Hope you liked my return postcard 🙂
Top post: this is the Home Page/Archives, which is the most recent post I’ve written, but since it constantly changes, the post with the most reads could really be any one of them… The next most clicked on entry is the first one, about my reasons for applying to the Peace Corps. That’s probably as it should be because I never did complete the About page which is the page with the most clicks. Sorry.
Top search: to Mongolia with love. Haha! Looks like some people need to bookmark that.
It’s also been searched as “tomongoliawithlove” “tomongoliawithlove.wordpress” “from Mongolia with love” (which was in contention) and “frommongoliawithlove”. The search for “love Nickerson Mongolia” was clearly for me. The searches for “love in Mongolia” and “Mongolia love blog” are less clearly for me. Again, haha! There’ve been multiple search attempts using variations of “Peace Corps” + “blog” + “Mongolia” + “2013”.
The search for “affection in Mongolian families” linked the person to one of my personal all time favorite blogs, and I hope the searcher was satisfied with my assessment. I’m sure the person who searched for “negative Peace Corps experiences” was disappointed; deservedly, trying to get skewed results like that, shaking my head. Finally, I hope the person who searched “how are Mongolians similar to Americans, how are they different” was enlightened. And, I hope he/she, and you, keep visiting for more stories.
To Mongolia with Love 
All very interesting stats. Very surprised by the huge amount of spam comments you’ve had to delete, wow! Very surprised by the low amount of people who’ve subscribed by email (only 19). I wonder if that # is low because (like me) I didn’t realize for quite awhile that I could just plug my email address in at your blog and from then on, I’d rec’v your latest blog postings automatically, straight to my email! Before I discovered that (actually, you and Brandon told me or reminded about it), every once in a while I’d go to your blog to see if there were any new postings. Sometimes I’d forget to check for a week or two and it felt like a lot of work to try and remember to go to my “Favorites” or “Bookmarks” to see if you’d posted anything new. I LOVE receiving them straight to my email! A few coworkers of mine are fascinated by you (Love) and what you’re doing, but have been hesitant to sign up, mainly because they don’t like to receive a lot of emails, don’t get on their computers often and also like to be “under the radar” and “off the grid” as much as possible, so the idea of voluntarily posting their email address into a foreign blog makes them a bit uncomfortable. Hope that number grows in the future though, people just don’t know what they’re missing!
There are other ways (something called “google reader” is one) that people can sign up to receive new posts but I don’t really know about them and the site doesn’t record those as people who’ve subscribed, probably since they are via a third party.
Ha! Great post. I have one for you. The number of times we’ve missed you since you left us: hundreds.
Likewise, Maryse. Sometimes I wander the halls in my mind and remember who’s behind each door (or, at least who was there a year and a half ago).
Oh Love, I agree with both Priscilla & Maryse… “they don’t know what they’re missing” & “the number of times you’ve been missed”.
I also receive auto through email & it’s the best way not to miss one of your blog updates.
I’m one of the “non-statisticians” you mentioned & totally enjoy seeing the categories broken down. I, too, can’t believe that you got SO many spam comments. [Not our little Love 😦 ]
I’m quite surprised & a little disappointed that the number of people who actually read your blog is so low. I stand on my original belief that you should make your blog into a book as it is worthy of such.
Always enjoy hearing from you, love & miss you. ~Auntie~ ❤
Well, maybe the number of subscriptions is low, but my blog has had nearly 8,000 visitors. And when you visit the home page, you can see all of the most recent blogs in one long entry–so we’ll never know how many individual entries have been read by how many people.
Love, we are all so proud of you. YOU are such a courageous, inspirational and giving woman. We love and miss you!
Thanks to Priscilla’s info. Im now adding you to my fb/email accounts.
hi, my name is aggy, i am a mongolian currently living in london, trying to catch up with everything about mongolia, i like a positive attitude from all peace corps volonteers in mongolia, would like to say a big thank you to all of you, guys, for helping us in every field, you are a very speciall people (i hope you know that), to come to the shithole to help to make it better place and most important, you do it for free, for example i could’ t do that, all the best, looking forward to your posts, cheers,
This one was fun. And I agree with Maryse. 🙂
Super fun post, Love. We do miss you like crazy!