The Cabbages of Doom

My blog is a fairly modest affair that gets around 500 pageviews a day - mostly of old posts. However, this week has seen a rather unexpected spike in activity:

What happened on the 15^th of April? It seems to be something to do with MacBook Air storage expansion, as that’s the post that seems to have the lion’s share of pageviews this week:

The odd thing is that in the detailed stats view, the peak of views is on the 16^th. More dodgy Blogger stats it seems. Clearly unimportant but if anyone knows what’s going on (in either case), I’d be interested to hear!

I noticed that my blog hit another landmark recently, exceeding 200,000 pageviews. I was therefore curious to see once again what were the most popular posts. At 100,000 pageviews, the top three were:

1. Expanding Macbook Air disk space with SD cards (4002 VIEWS)
2. OMICS Group Conferences - Sham or Scam? (Either way, don’t go to one!) (4000 VIEWS)
3. How to root a phylogenetic tree (2662 VIEWS)

The updated top ten, according to the “Stats » Posts” page on Blogger look like this:

So, no change in the top three other than a reversal of #1 and #2. Except… looking at the “Posts” page revealed that a number of more recent posts exceeded some of the listed posts. Last year’s Paddy’s Day post, for example, has 707 views, not the 524 listed. Not a big problem in the grand scheme of things but a little annoying. (What’s the point of providing stats if they don’t agree?!)

Out of curiosity, I decided to go through the individual post counts. The top six are the same order, at least, just with higher page counts:

1. OMICS Group Conferences - Sham or Scam? (Either way, don’t go to one!) (11503 pageviews)

2. Expanding Macbook Air disk space with SD cards (9054 pageviews)

3. How to root a phylogenetic tree (7913 pageviews)

4. Are “Happy Eggs” really happy? (And are Viva really pro-welfare?) (6047 pageviews)

5. How to stop Outlook on Mac OSX replacing quotes & apostrophes with superscript numbers (5883 pageviews)

6. Avenged Sevenfold - my kind of Nightmare for Halloween (1803 pageviews)

However, then it deviates in both order and number, with the rest of the top 20 posts beating the 1000 views and thus the listed ranks 7-10, which are either missing or muddled:

7. Putting photos on Picasa with an iPad = 1684

8. Artificial Selection versus Natural Selection = 1641

9. (≠10) Kumala Zenith Merlot/Cab Sav/Shiraz - another bargain red = 1604

10. (≠8) Who does Microsoft Academic Research think you are? = 1301

11. (≠7) When snowmen go bad (Christmas graffiti) = 1286

12. Making e-Books with Wikipedia = 1263

13. Differential survival, (inclusive) fitness, selection and evolution = 1207

14. Blogging in Markdown with Blogger and Markable (on a Mac) = 1124

15. When is a Moro not a Boost? When it’s an Aussie Cadbury’s Mars Bar! = 1107

16. iPlan with Onzo revisited (and not recommended) = 1100

17. A review of the “Instant Markdown” eBook from Packt Publishing = 1064

18. Finding Nemo’s sex-changing father = 1063

19. Marvellous Markdown = 1031

20. How to read a phylogenetic tree = 1014

The Paddy’s Day post was way down with 707 pageviews. Indeed, three posts that I feel are much more worthy weighed in higher (along with some others):

• Wallace was not forgotten and Darwin did not cheat him = 922

• Prominent anti-GM campaigner becomes GM defender after looking into the science = 748

• Australia: a country so big that its rainfall can affect global sea level = 735

I guess the take-home message is: don’t count pageviews!

It seems that the titles of my blog posts have gone a bit screwy. This happened once before but I can't remember how to fix it - if anyone knows, please comment below!

The blog hit a landmark today, so I am taking a brief break from grant writing for a quick reflection on the top posts and see how things have changed since my last reflection in January last year. Happily, the top three posts are all (kind of) science/technology related now, rather than the wine/kitten/celebratory/ sex influenced selection before! (I’m a little disappointed that Finding Nemo’s sex-changing father has dropped out of the top ten, though.)

Looking at the "Popular posts this week", the top three of all time are actually not too surprising, being the same top three as this week. What did surprise me was the gap to post number 4, with number 3 having nearly 2000 more pageviews! Here then, for posterity, are the top 3 pages of all time, as of today:

		#1. (4002 views) Expanding Macbook Air disk space with SD cards I’ve had my Macbook Air for over a year now (crazy how time flies) and I still love it. The only drawback really is the limited disk space ...
		#2. (4000 views) OMICS Group Conferences - Sham or Scam? (Either way, don't go to one!) I want to preface this post by saying that it’s been one of the harder ones to decide whether to write. On the one hand, it feels a little u...
		#3. (2662 views) How to root a phylogenetic tree Teaching phylogenetics, it is clear that one of the things that causes a surprising amount of confusion is rooting the tree - defining the ...