Kana's Chronicles

Hi, my name is Kana, and I’m a stats-aholic.

I admit it.  I look at my blog stats a lot.  It’s the feel-good-fix for which I don’t want to go to Anonymous meetings.  Unlike alcohol (for which I DO go to meetings), my stats addiction doesn’t turn me Stupid.  (At least, I don’t think it does…)

My statistics-addiction isn’t limited to my blog, either; I’ve always been a numbers-and-spreadsheets kind of girl.  I keep spreadsheets on the household bills and income (what there is of the latter to track, anyway). A while back I made a spreadsheet of all the common grocery-items I bought regularly, researched their prices at five different stores, and then programmed an app (back when I had a Palm Pilot) for my grocery-list.  Any item I added to the list got automatically tagged with the store where I should buy that item, so I hit the cheapest three stores once every week, pulled up each store’s shopping list, and bought every item at its cheapest price. (That was back before you could buy apps, so I thought it was a pretty neat trick.)

I made spreadsheets with pop-up graphs of our daily revenue and expenses when we owned a restaurant. When I built the restaurant’s website, I learned all the analytics tools that could help me track the traffic and see where search-referrals were coming from.  I chatted with our customers, found out how they’d learned about us, and kept notes behind the register so I could gauge the effectiveness of different advertising venues.  (In case you wondered, our super-cheap FaceBook advertising blew everything else out of the water.  Everything, that is, except “word of mouth,” which of course didn’t cost us a dime.)

So really, my obsession with blog stats should come as no surprise.  It’s just my most recent place to get my hands dirty with digits. I like getting numbers under my fingernails.

All my spreadsheet-skills, though, don’t tell me what to think about the numbers I end up cleaning out from under my nails at the end of the day–so here I am pondering my blog stats in amazement.  This is my seventh week of blogging, and I LOVE the online community and incredible array of reading material I’ve found here on WordPress. What an amazing welcome you folks have given me.  I’m looking at an incomprehensible 10,000+ hits and 540+ followers–most of whom stumbled across my blog (I’m pretty sure) after I read theirs…  So here’s a toast (non-alcoholic for me, thanks) to the virtual bread-crumb-trails that help us find each other’s writing, and here’s to the myriad of writers here whose daily writing I so enjoy…

The collage I put together a while back to head up my online Reading Log included this definition:

“Literary Slut. n. Promiscuous reader. Goes to bed with any book.”

Add BLOG to that definition, and I’ll readily ‘fess up. :) Thanks, all, for reading along with me, and for keeping me in such a steady supply of reading material!

Extra Happy-Dancing thanks to all of you who answered my Blogger Call to Action  this week by changing your blog settings for iPad readers.  My morning cup-of-coffee-and-blog-browsing the very next day was so enjoyable I nearly cried.  You guys rock!! :)