It's My 1st Blogiversary!

It's time to celebrate!  Let's bring out the cake and ice cream and light the birthday candle!  My blog is turning one year old tomorrow, April 5, 2013. I would have posted this one-year anniversary post on my actual blogiversary, but I already have my weekly Fab Finds post scheduled for that day. So, I'll just celebrate a day early!

Has it really been one year since I started this blog? I can't believe it! Where did the time go?

First of all, I want to thank all of you, my wonderful readers and fellow genealogy bloggers, for your kindness and support.  It can be a scary and intimidating thing to start a blog and "put yourself out there" on the web.  But you've been so very welcoming and supportive and I want to thank you for that.

And I would be remiss if I didn't give a huge thank-you to Thomas MacEntee at GeneaBloggers.  He is a wonderful mentor and advocate for genealogy bloggers everywhere.  Thank you Thomas for creating GeneaBloggers.  It's such a friendly, supportive and welcoming community.

In the past, I've seen other genealogy bloggers share their blog stats on their own blogiversaries.  I thought I'd do that as well.  It's interesting to analyze the blog stats, although I don't know just how accurate they really are when I take into account possible spam hits to my blog posts.

Nevertheless, the stats will hopefully give a pretty good overall picture about my blog and what my readers have enjoyed reading.

I compared my Blogger stats with my Feedburner stats and they are not the same.  And I'm not sure why.

According to Blogger, my top ten most popular posts are as follows:

1. Follow Friday–Fab Finds for December 28, 2012
2. Follow Friday–Fab Finds for January 18, 2013
3. Follow Friday–Fab Finds for September 14, 2012
4. Follow Friday–Fab Finds for March 29, 2013
5. Thanks for Traveling Frederick! - U.S. Consular Registration Application ~ 1917
6. Tech Tuesday - OneNote For Genealogy ~ Research Bookmarks
7. Follow Friday–Fab Finds for February 1, 2013
8. Follow Friday–Fab Finds for March 22, 2013
9. Ancestor Landing Page ~ Debs Webster Family Immigration Story
10. Treasure Chest Thursday–The Big Reveal ~ What's In The Old Metal Tube?

According to Feedburner, these are my top ten posts:

1. Follow Friday–Fab Finds for March 22, 2013
2. Will You Be Watching?
3. My 4th Great-Grandfather's Signature on a Revolutionary War Document ~ Dated August 23, 1776
4. I've Changed My Mind
5. Tech Tuesday - OneNote For Genealogy ~ Research Bookmarks
6. Tuesday’s Tip ~ Three Awesome Websites for Genealogy…Found on Pinterest!
7. Follow Friday–Fab Finds for January 4, 2013
8. Military Monday ~ Revolutionary War Surgeon: Luther Waterman
9. Tech Tuesday ~ Watermarked Photos
10. Follow Friday–Fab Finds for November 23, 2012

In the Blogger stats, my Fab Finds posts dominate the top 10 spots, but in Feedburner, they don't.  I wonder which one is more accurate.

Something else I found to be quite interesting were the referrals.  Here's a sample from Feedburner:





See what's at the top of the list?  Yep, RebelMouse!  What a surprise!  And RebelMouse was the #1 referrer in eight of my top ten popular posts in Feedburner's list.  RebelMouse was the #3 referrer for the other two posts.  Wow!  I have to admit to being quite shocked at this finding, especially since I've only been using RebelMouse for a short time.

Here's what Blogger shows as my top ten referring URLs and referring sites:




Again, I don't know why these are different from Feedburner.

It looks like GeneaBloggers, Sepia Saturday, Genea-Musings, Twitter, and Facebook are in the top ten list of my referring URLs and referring sites in Blogger's list.  Thank you Thomas MacEntee at GeneaBloggers, Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings, Sepia Saturday bloggers, and all of those who have used Facebook or Twitter to access my blog!

Okay, enough with the stats…let's have some cake!  But, before we dig in, I want to thank you all again for taking the time to read my blog this past year.  And thank you to those who've left comments, "liked" my blog posts on Facebook, "+1'd" them on Google+, retweeted them on Twitter, or shared them through any other social media platform.  You guys are awesome!

Thanks for reading!

Jana

© 2013 Copyright by Jana Last