Admittedly, I haven’t been posting here as often as I used to. Life was busy over 2024, with foraging, attending craft and wellness fairs as a vendor, doing foraging workshops, etc. I wrote on my coaching blog far more often as a result! None of that stopped people from accessing what is already here however, and that is the nice thing about blog articles. Once they are up, people can come across them whenever they want or need to.
Going back over the top 20 posts of 2024, we have the following list:
Country | Visitor Count | View Count |
China | 18549 | 77824 |
Singapore | 3342 | 9619 |
United States | 2097 | 6673 |
Australia | 468 | 1290 |
Hong Kong | 445 | 1268 |
Brazil | 188 | 265 |
France | 178 | 1063 |
Canada | 89 | 174 |
Bangladesh | 66 | 99 |
India | 52 | 72 |
United Kingdom | 46 | 72 |
Germany | 45 | 148 |
Russian Federation | 45 | 78 |
Lithuania | 30 | 40 |
Netherlands | 28 | 39 |
Romania | 24 | 53 |
Honduras | 14 | 61 |
Belize | 14 | 40 |
Mexico | 13 | 26 |
Italy | 13 | 26 |
Israel | 10 | 198 |
A quick glance through the above list reveals that people are concerned with what they are being told and whether or not it is true or a lie. People are concerned about provisions they do or don’t have set by, and they are concerned about world affairs. Stress is apparent in the article choices this past year as well. Many of these kinds of discussions also appear over at my coaching blog, scattered among the health-related topics there. It was encouraging to see my article on Gratitude in the top 3 articles on this blog!
Early in 2024, I noticed a massive number of 404 error code hits to my site, as well as to “pages” or URL’s that technically don’t work because they are not part of how my site works. As it turns out, much of that was coming out of China, as evidenced in the visitor logs at left here.
Well over 2400 people chose not to have their country tracked. Now whether or not those were bots or actual people I’ll never know, but once I got a handle on the malicious visits, the counts in other areas of my counter became more reasonable. On the left, you can see that only China has the unusually high number of visitors and views.
It’s always useful to see where people are coming from, and to my surprise, most of last year’s visitors came from a source I never visit anymore: Pinterest. A few other referrers showed up in the list, but Pinterest sent the largest number of visitors last year, at least as far as recorded tracking is concerned. Where people came from doesn’t match how many came however, as you can see comparing this list on the right with the top 20 articles above.
This is no doubt due to the fact that between the use of bots to populate search engines, scraper bots looking for information they can grab, and real people getting tired of how invasive tracking technology has become, the idea of finding out where they came from is a statistic that is now less and less useful. If nothing else, it is entertaining to see where visitors are finding me, but can no longer be used as a tool to say that a given engine or area of the globe should be targeted with more specific articles people want to see. I myself have begun using anti-tracking technology because of how badly Big Tech has been using it over the past decade or more! I can’t fault others for doing what I’m doing. We want to be safe in the world we live in now, and that means reducing our traceable online activities. We won’t be able to completely remove our online trails, but doing so where we can is now so important that regulations such as the GDPR came into effect in recent years, PIPEDA in Canada, and other regulations around the globe all aimed at not doing more tracking than is absolutely necessary, and to give people the option to opt out or request that information they supplied a site be removed.
The big thing for me is looking back and learning what people came to my site for, the most frequently over the past year. The top 20 list this year definitely spells out truth over lies, stress, and preparation. Now we wait and see what 2025 holds.