Another Year of Chawing Rosin
At the end of the year, I like to visit my stats page and take a look at who’s visiting the Chawed Rosin, how they find their way here, and what they look at when they get there.
The vast majority of visitors to the Chawed Rosin come to look at pictures, which says as much about how search engines work as it does about the blog. I try to include lots of pictures here, no matter what the subject, and search engines seem to like that.
There were 346,920 total visits to the Chawed Rosin in 2010, for an average of more than 900 a day – well above the 150 or so a day I received in my first year of posting.
The top ten search terms leading to the Chawed Rosin this year were:
robert louis stevenson
andre derain
ingres
derain
dodo
robert frost
albrecht durer
postsecret
baby panda
light pollution
Here are some of the more interesting search terms for the year:
people floating
hoodwink
perky snood
lysol douche (a perennial favorite)
xray specs
flying ferret
football kitty
boy scouts jerk off (there were several variations on this theme, though I fear the results were disappointing)
radiolab marshmallow test
what mcnuggets are made of
The most popular items posted in 2010 were:
Emil Nolde: Scenes from the Life of Christ: 4,492
José Clemente Orozco’s Social Realist Paintings: 1,983
William Morris Tapestries: 1,936
Walter Crane’s Illustrations for Grimms’ Fairy Tales: 1,108
Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter: 1,091
Vintage Knits: Mohair Sweaters from 1962: 949
Finnish Lessons with the Dudesons: 867
X-Ray Specs: 858
The posts with the most visits, however, were all older posts, and all accessed, I think, mainly for the pictures. The all-time highest number of visits to the blog on a single day was on November 13th, 2010, when 37,186 people came to look at my post of the poem Foreign Lands, by Robert Louis Stevenson, a statistical anomaly that I have yet to figure out. It must have crossed some threshold for search engine criteria, probably because of the pictures. One of my rare essays even made the list, but that’s probably because it was illustrated with many adorable pictures of pandas (which just proves the point I was making in the essay, by the way):
Foreign Lands, by Robert Louis Stevenson: 43,615
Andre Derain: 13,984
Albrecht Dürer: 11,908
Ingres Pencil Drawings: 10,804
Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms: 9,824
1965 Boy Scout Handbook: 9,738
Kakslauttanen Igloo Village: 9,104
Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece: 6,845
Light Pollution Near Tenerife, Canary Islands: 6,218
The Aaawww-piate of the Masses: 6,120
Thanks for stopping by, everyone! You’re welcome to look at my pictures any time!
The Chawed Rosin 
I like your summary very much. The Chawed Rosin is like an attic full of paintings, books, old clothes, souvenirs, radios. Neat things. Where do you keep the puppets? In the chest marked Puppets, I see. Smart. Thank you Lolarusa!
I really like that somebody was searching for “perky snood”.