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As I noted a couple of weeks ago, with so much going on in my life now, I've decided to stop updating this blog on a weekly basis, especially as I only have about two readers who check the blog out regularly. Instead, I'll be sharing charts as my curiosity takes shape and demands a new chart. A large reason for the change is that I now have a girlfriend--and marriage is likely. When I look at the subject of charts over the last couple of years, reading and writing were certainly two of the most popular, but most popular of all, in terms of the types of charts I created (and those that people read most often) were those related to dating, which for me is now finally, after forty-three years of life, coming to a close, other than with one lady with whom I've been blessed to connect.

Chart Types Used on This Blog

I figured it would be a good time to update this blog to see what sort of chart types I tended to prefer over the history of this blog:

Blog Views per Entry

As my life is likely going to go through significant changes this next year and time no longer allows quite as much time to devote to certain odd passions of mine, I'm going to probably stop updating this blog regularly. It takes a lot of work and relatively few people read it, as seen in the table of relative popularity of my blogs per entry:

Books Ratings Each Year

It appears that some years I am a softee (e.g., 2011), and in other years I find nearly nothing absolutely stunning (this being one of those years). In all years, I end up at least liking or finding passably good most books I read, which makes sense, since I'm the one who selects them. Here are how many books received each star rating by each year (2012 isn't complete yet, though), with five being "loved," four being "liked," three being "okay," two being "didn't like," and one being "hated":

And here is how it looks as a percent:

Hits on My Reading Blog

So last week, I discussed how the hits on this blog are pretty much the same after a full year of posts. My most successful blog, however, is a far different matter. As one can see in the chart below, hits pretty quickly (within four months--I didn't track the first three months) hit one hundred per month, and over the course of that first year tripled to three hundred.

The story continues. Since 2008, the number of hits on Short Story Reader has continued to grow, though the rate of growth has slowed significantly. Also, it's evident that the hits go up and down--especially during the summer--but the overall trajectory has been up, now usually topping nine hundred a month.

My Life in Charts Hits per Month

My Life in Charts is one year old. From what I can tell, though, it hasn't caught on with readers. I average about the same number of hits a year later per month as I did when I started--in fact, lately the projectory is down. In a few weeks I'll compare that to another blog of mine whose audience has grown steadily over the years it's been up, including just its first year.

My Personal Website Hits

I maintain several websites and blogs. On several of them, I run Google Analytics to calibrate hit count and to see what pages are popular and how users are finding my site. Recently, I updated my personal website. That's the one that basically has links to virtually all of the other sites. It's about me, as opposed to being about charts I create or things I read. I updated in part because the look of the site had been the same since about 2008 when I created the site. Also, a couple of items in the navigation bar stopped working, and I couldn't figure out why.

Looking over the hits per month, however, I am surprised to see that my personal website has actually had a small increase in average hits per months over the years, up to about twenty (you can discount February--the one with the most hits near the end of the line in the chart--it is an anomaly caused by my own multiple viewing of the site in trying to fix it). Where are these people coming from? Apparently, some of them are finding me via my thesis, which is posted on the personal site (hidden near the top of my vita page). It's about the short stories of Jayne Anne Phillips and offers critical commentary on a few more-obscure stories that is probably not available elsewhere; I'm glad if the thesis is of use to anyone.

Anyway, here's how the hits have increased through the years:

Google Search Finds

Around June 21, I did a search for my writing name in quote marks to see what would show up and how often. (A search for my everyday name without quotes would be interesting to chart as well, though I'd have to limit the data to the first ten pages or so, since the names are so common as to give an huge number of returns. Something tells me the first folks on there would be Jon Davies the weatherman and Jon Davies the anthropologist. I think I show up somewhere down between number 10 and 30 on some social network, which rather surprises me, since there's not much reason to include me there.)

Anyway, here's how the breakdown appears:
Or to put it in another way (as a percentage):
My name is most connected to a story that appeared in Stymie magazine. I find that interesting because it's not an easy story to get to, but Stymie, a literary magazine on sports, apparently is well connected to various sporting sites, and so my name is now connected to sites wherein you can buy basketballs and jock straps, which is certainly what I think of when I think of me.

What I find most interesting is how some journals really do a great job of getting their name out in search results. Bull, for instance, which published "The Heart Is a Strong Instrument," tweets new stories, blogs about them, Facebooks them, and so on, so that the story isn't just being hit up at its site but at all these companion sites. "The Next Superstar," which appeared in Battered Suitcase, is also listed a lot because the folks at the Suitcase cross-publish the magazine not just in html on their site but in various e-book platforms like Smashwords and as a print-on-demand journal.

I don't tweet, and I don't really use Facebook effectively, so my own site lingers somewhat down in the pile comparatively (though it comes up on the first page, probably because so many of my author bios point to my main site). My reading blog, Short Story Reader, however, has gotten attention in numerous places and so shows up pretty high up on the number of links Google finds. There again, it's more the work of others drawing attention to it than my own work of tweeting or Facebooking about it.

Anyway, if I were to ever start an online literary journal, I think the charts above might be a useful tool with regard to how to publicize the material in the journal--namely, make it available in lots of platforms.