0 What's up with Sitemeter?

 UPDATE: 31 hours now, and still waiting...

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When we turned on our computer this morning, we hadn't had a single visit to Keeping Stock since about 11pm last night. We thought that was a bit strange, because we'd had several comments in that period.

As at 8pm this evening, we still haven't had a single visitor all day, according to Sitemeter. But we're getting this odd message:

Fortunately, we also have Statcounter as a back-up, and we've certainly had passers-by today as you can see from this.

So has any other blogger had this issue before? We have Sitemeter drop out completely from time to time, but this is the first time it's just lost track of all our traffic. We're hoping they'll find our missing punters, because we're headed for another record month!

0 Tweet of the Day - 21 May 2014

We were surprised to get this tweet this morning:

It's not that often that we are guilty of starting a trend. In fact critics would say that we are followers, rather than leaders! But for once, we were at the head of the pack.

There was genuine interest in the identity of Player X however. We posted Who is Player X? at 3.10pm on Monday. Around 5pm, we noticed a surge in visitor numbers, so we checked the referral source on Sitemeter. Most of the hits were coming via Google. We entered "who is player x?" on Google, and our post was at the top of the results list.

For the hours that followed, visitors poured in at a very steady rate. The numbers began to slow a little after the Herald named Chris Cairns as Player X, but Monday and Tuesday were probably our busiest days ever, as you will see from the graph below.

We're grateful for the spike in traffic, but we'd far rather it was at something other than cricket's expense!

0 Nearly, but not quite

After our busiest ever blogging month in March, we had low expectations for April. The combination of a 30-day month, public holidays (Easter and Anzac Day) and our trip to South Australia all pointed to falling numbers in the latter part of the month.

And we were right; visitor numbers were down, but not by as much as we had expected, and we still recorded our second-ever busiest month both for unique visits and page views. Here are the numbers:

We were more surprised however to hold our place at #10 in Open Parachute's New Zealand Blog Rankings. We have some way to go to catch the likes of Whaleoil, Kiwiblog or even the union-funded Daily Blog, but for a most-of-the-time one-man band we're not doing too badly.

As always, we note that these results are entirely based on the premise that people will vote with their mouse, and pay us a visit. In order for them to do that, we have to provide content that's worthy of checking out, and that's what we try to do; sometimes, more successfully than others! So thanks for stopping by, and please call again; we DO appreciate it.