I never did do a 2010 year in numbers feature but it’s back this year. All kinds of great stuff for last year.
Website
It didn’t feel like I did very many updates to the website last year but looking over it I added 20 new pages. Last year it was 23 and in 2009 there was 21 so I wasn’t that far off from previous years.
I used to really keep track of how many different people were visiting the website but I have to be honest, this site has a really narrow focus, namely, people who want to find out what is going on with the McEachern family so I’ve really stopped caring how many people are visiting the site, though I still like looking at some of the other statistics.
The top visited pages specifically for 2011 were
- Andrew’s birthday party.
- Trip to Sea World San Antonio.
- Andrew Baseball
- Alex’s birthday party
- Florida Trip
However, these pages were not the most visited pages on the website. The top two were
- Newfie Jokes – “newfie jokes” also happens to be top search term used to find the site.
- Statue of Liberty – “statue of liberty” is the 3rd most popular search term that brings people to the site.
One of the reasons these are the two most popular is that I prevent search engines like Google and Yahoo from indexing any pages outside of the blog so random people who find the site will be directed there.
The other stat I like looking at is where people are visiting the site from. Last year people visited from a total of 76 unique counties. The United States and Canada were obviously the two most popular followed by the UK, Brazil (hey Jesse and Otto), Australia, and Germany. The green shaded countries below are where people visited from, the darker the green the greater number of visitors.
There were also visitors from 950+ unique cities and this graphic shows where the top 250 of those cities are located. The larger and darker the circle the more people.
Swimming
I kept up swimming this year and like I’ve been doing since I was a teenager I’ve been keeping track of everything I do in the pool. Over the past five years this year I swam farthest.
I set myself of goal of going 300 miles which was pretty aggressive since in the past five years the most I had gone was around 250. I managed to just squeak over the goal with 305 miles.
September was the longest month and I was just short of 40 miles. I have masters swimming logs from 2006 and since that time I’ve gone 1,260 miles/ 2,027 km, a total of 2,217,448 yards.
On a map that brings me from my door step to about 30 miles short of London, Ontario somewhere on highway 402.
Reading
I made an effort to try and read more books this year. I’m really jealous of Jen who can speed though piles of books while I plod though at a snails pace,heck even Alex is a faster reader then I am.
Despite my slow reading ability I got through 12 books last year. I read the first two books in the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell. These were originally published in the early 90′s but I had never heard of them until I read a review for the latest book in the series that was published last year and they compared it to Steig Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” books. They were similar in that they are by a Swedish author, take place in Sweden, and they are novels about violent crimes. Overall I was very pleased and will probably read more in the series when I have time.
Next up I read two books by Jo Nesbo from the Harry Hole series. These were also part of my Scandinavian author kick though these are set in Oslo Norway and not Sweden. For Christmas I received the latest book in the series so I’ll have that to read this year.
During the summer Alex checked out “The Mortal Engines” by Philip Reeve from the library and it sounded interesting so I decided to read it. It was the first book in the “Mortal Engines Quartet” about a time in the future where the world has been totally devastated after the sixty minute war and technology that we have has been totally been lost. Nations as we know them no longer exist and they have been replaced with the “Tractionist” and “Anti-Tractionist” movements. Traction cities are mounted on huge moveable platforms and the cites move around the continent eating up smaller cities. It all sounds very strange but it was a really good series and according to what I have seen on the internet Peter Jackson will be directing and producing a 3D version of story.
For the new year I already have 5 books on the pile so it looks like I’m set until June.
Movies
We are Netflix subscribers and this year the company took a lot of heat for raising their prices fairly substantially and then in an attempt to try and smooth things over they announced they were going to split the company in two. One for users who get DVD’s by mail and another to serve users streaming content. We have both the one DVD out at a time and the unlimited streaming service. I wasn’t so upset about the price hike, that’s the cost of doing business, but splitting the company in two was going to be a pain since I would have to manage my movie lists in two different places.
After much pressure Netflix scrapped the idea of forming two different companies and kept everything under the Netflix name. This is great because for Christmas we got an internet enabled TV with Netflix and we can stream movies right to television without having to hook it up to a separate system.
Looking back through my DVD history we went through 31 movies, mostly stuff for the kids. I only streamed 16 films to my computer during the year but since we got the new TV with build in Netflix we have already gone through 10 movies.
I would say my favorites for the year would be the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series, the Swedish versions. I thought they stuck very close to the book and the actors did a great job. I have it on my todo list to see the Hollywood version but haven’t yet had the chance to do that.
