Blogger has some features that provide useful information to blog owners and blog readers.
One of these is the Popular Posts widget. I have configured it to display thumbnails of the top ten posts in descending order of the number of all-time views that they have had.
I monitor the Popular Posts to check for changes: some entries move up, some move down, some appear, some disappear and some of the latter group re-appear.
It will obviously take a while before the more recent posts build up enough views to qualify for inclusion; I would expect the list to consist of the oldest posts, but it contains some relative newcomers.
The top two positions have always been held by the article about Princess Margaret and the one about Maria Callas and the Duchess of Windsor. This is not really surprising: royals and celebrities are of interest to a great many people.
It is completely unexpected but very gratifying to see two Curse or Coincidence articles involving writers in the list: they are much more representative of this blog than the royal posts are. I wonder why Mary Webb and Kathleen Raine rather than the Brontë family got in though!
I have been wondering for years why the article on Aryan Supremacy has always been popular enough to qualify!
The article about Rudyard Kipling's New Year Resolutions has been moving steadily upwards and is currently in sixth position. This seems strange to me: it is not one of the oldest posts and I would not have expected it to be anything like so popular.
The article about Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and the Isle of Wight appeared in the list for the first time recently. It is another mystery why this particular article should have suddenly attracted so many readers.
The two Kipling articles have risen through the ranks at the expense of Nicholas Stuart Gray's named witches; all three have made the top ten in the past, but currently only one remains.
Perhaps Google Search results are responsible for some of the anomalies. Perhaps success breeds more success, and once an article is highlighted in the list it attracts even more readers.
Blogger Stats is another useful feature, although the information it provides doesn't always match that given in Google Analytics and the view numbers may go back only ten years.
Known bots and spiders are automatically excluded, but some sources say that the given viewing figures are too low. I take these figures as relative and indicative rather than actual.
When it comes to the ten next most popular articles, witches are doing well while cults and public libraries are conspicuous by their absence. This is disappointing but understandable: many of these articles are relatively recent so have not been around long enough to gain many views.
I hope that some cult and library articles will appear in the Popular Posts list some time in the future.
