Weekly Rundown: Stats & Stuff

Considering how action-packed my last few weeks have been, this week has been surprisingly quiet. It’s made for quite a nice change.

My participation in the A to Z Challenge has been somewhat lax owing to the fact that I’ve not had an internet connection for much of the week. The two days when I was able to get online on my laptop for a couple of hours in the evening were mostly spent catching up on comments here, replying to them and returning visits to their blogs. And I did all that on my Kindle (which isn’t the best way of doing things).

Today I’m splitting my time between replying to and returning visits to people who have commented on my blog, catching up on the blogs I read regularly and trying to get through forty or so blogs from the challenge list. If you’re visiting because of a comment I left on your blog today then you know that’s going quite well. ;-)

Despite my tardiness in visiting the blogs of other challenge participants, I’m still getting a vast number of hits. I’ve actually broken my total number of pageviews for last month and I’ve just managed to break my highest number of pageviews in a month ever! When I checked this morning I was at 5,064, more in a month than ever before. I'm quite pleased.

I’m thrilled because I’ve noticed my posts getting retweeted on Twitter as well. Considering I picked my A to Z theme of IVF/ICSI in the hopes of raising awareness for people on both sides of the treatment process, I’d say that I’m achieving my target. So yay!

Other than failing to visit other blogs and celebrating my rising pageview counter, I’ve been reading a lot.

It took me an age to get through The Pickwick Papers (read: one week). That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy it, it just felt like I was running on the spot a lot of the time. You’d sit and read and read and read for an hour or so, check your progress and find you were only a tiny bit further on in the book. I suspect that some of this was because I was reading it on my Kindle so didn’t have that physical representation of how much I’d read (at least when you’re reading a book-book you can feel how far through a book you are).

Now I’ve moved on to Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales. Like The Pickwick Papers this is another book for the Reading Challenge (Pickwick was for a popular author’s first book, this is for a book by an author you love that you’ve not read yet). Despite weighing in at about as many pages as the Dickens book, I feel like I’m getting through it a lot quicker.

This week looks set to be a little bit busier as we’re gearing up for my birthday. We’ve got a trip to Oban coming up which I’m planning on using to buy even more reading material and having the day off for my birthday should give me a little more time to get caught up online while I’m somewhere with an internet connection.

See you there!