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 in the list: they are much more representative of this blog than the royal posts are. I do very much wonder though why the posts about the poet and scholar Kathleen Raine and the Shropshire novelist Mary Webb have made it into the top ten rather then the one about the Brontë family.
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.
