Coffee with Clark "blogstone," by the numbers

Screen shot of blog page views per month from beginning in May 2009 til today when it surpassed 5,000 monthly views for first time.--Note: Blogspot is wrong, not May 2007, but 2009.

Coffee with Clark reached a "blogstone" today--more than 5,000 views in a calendar month. That's a long way from May 2009 when it started.

Here are the numbers:

•  5,012--December page views at 9:45 am today
• 4,459--Previous high month, July, 2013

105,000+ --page views total

Page views by country

United States	66350
Russia	4423
Germany	4282
United Kingdom	2533
Ukraine	2277
France	1878
China	926
Canada	687
Poland	670
India	607

• 128--number of countries with readers
• 33--new countries this year

Blog posts per year

• 2009--339
• 2010--292
• 2011--135
• 2012--203
• 2013--252--by December 31

Months with most posts

• August, 2009--76
• July, 2009--70
• January, 2010--57
• April, 2010--47
• December, 2013!--39--by the end of the year

Day with most page views

• Dec, 23, 2013--532! A watercolor "Christmas eve journey"

Most popular posts of all time

• 2492--All aboard for Bartlesville , October, 2010 (I have no idea why)
• 1646--All aboard, August, 2010
• Actually top six posts of all time include the words "All aboard." Lots of train buffs?

Most popular posts in last month

• 129--Flags of historic friends--Canada, Feb. 2012 (This is now the 10th most popular posting of all time) I wondered about posting articles and maps about the countries of my readers, but apparently, it's interesting.
• 114--Black Friday blues, November, 2013
• 75--A Friday night 44 years ago, Nov. 2013
• 71--Raining ice as the sun comes out, December, 2013

My favorite and most creative posts--helping earn the Okie Blog Best Writing in the State Award in 2009

•  "The booth is a verb"--More than 10,000 words in multiple chapters telling the story of the booth and my friend, the late Bob Illidge, from 2009.

This blog is typical of many, starting out with a flurry of postings, bottled up inside, or from something that triggers a passion. That's why the first year had so many postings and then tapered off. I wondered when I started it if it'd continue, and it did slump, but has picked back up.
That's due in part because I teach a class in blogging at UCO and have to be active to have integrity. It's also due to the fact that the blog has grown and changed since the beginning and I've learned a lot and changed too. 
It now includes more photographs and paintings, and more story telling I think. The design has changed with the times too. What hasn't changed in the past four months is the title photo at the top, from my back road solo trip to New Mexico. That photo tells you so much about me and my interests. But it will eventually change too.
 What's next? I have no idea, although I've said for some time I want to take the blog to the "next level," whatever that means. I hope it means switching formats and hosts, adding advertising for some income, and emphasizing travel more. But I don't really know.
Why do I do this? I guess because I'm a first-born Capricorn  and deep down, a journalist.
When I owned the Waurika News-Democrat, my weekly column was titled "Trail Talk," because we were on the old Chisholm Trail. As a friend once said to me about this blog, "Hey, you've got your column back."