2012 Annual Blog Review

Happy New Year!  And welcome 2013!

This is my annual end-of-the-year/beginning-of-the-year review post.  I don’t really expect anyone else to find it interesting.  In the past I crunched a lot of numbers manually from the wordpress stats page on my dashboard.  This year, wordpress has made a very nice review page.  Click on the picture above or the link below.  Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 24,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 6 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Of course, I still had to crunch the numbers.  It’s amazing to me that with only 19 posts written in 2012 that the blog still received 24,000 views.  I’m hoping to be a bit more regular in my posting in 2013.  Of course that’s what I hoped last year.  If you follow the blog, you know that in April of 2012 I tried the A-to-Z blog challenge.  I fizzled out somewhere around P and didn’t write again until December. So much for the discipline of writing everyday improving my blog.

So, without further ado, here is the list of the top 10-posts viewed in 2012.

1	Scary Rooms	2,694
2	The Bake House – Jabal Amman Restaurant Review	2,046
3	Amman turns . . . 100?	1,622
4	Jordan A to Z: M is for … Mansaf or Msakhan!	1,219
5	Jordan A to Z: K is for … Kings!	1,047
6	Pope Benedict visiting Jordan	958
7	Ramadan Breakfast at Hashem’s in Amman, Jordan	614
8	My thoughts on Ted Williams, homelessness and the value of fame in America	528
9	Eye Exams, Customer Service, and Paris Hilton	475
10	Christmas Lights and Nativity Scene near Amman Jordan (Fuheis)	428

Thanks to all of you who have been reading!

I am constantly surprised by the country stats from the blog.  WordPress recorded visitors from 134 countries last year.  That’s 65% of the nations in the world!  I broke down the top 25 countries by # of visits last year.

Rank	Country	Views
1	Jordan	7,116
2	United States	5,117
3	United Kingdom	1,220
4	Poland	748
5	Canada	679
6	Switzerland	453
7	United Arab Emirates	377
8	Australia	347
9	Germany	277
10	India	233
11	Netherlands	219
12	Saudi Arabia	213
13	Turkey	195
14	Philippines	190
15	France	158
16	Brazil	125
17	Egypt	119
18	Indonesia	117
19	Spain	113
20	Italy	107
21	Israel	102
22	Malaysia	102
23	Romania	100
24	Sweden	98
25	Pakistan	93

So thanks to everyone from around the globe for stopping by. My goal for 2013 is to generate more discussion on the blog … despite a high number of views, there are still very few comments.  It would be great to see some international dialogue taking place in this kind of forum.   Time will tell.  And speaking of time … here’s to a good 2013!