dave gorman and alice roberts having a nude roadside picnic in joanna lumley's plastic anus

I'm not an obsessive porer over my blog stats, but it is sometimes interesting to have a browse around and see what's going on. What you often find is that some old long-forgotten post is suddenly attracting loads of traffic for no discernible reason for a week or so, and then going quiet again. For instance, this week this brief and unremarkable four-and-a-half-year-old post is comfortably the most-visited one (with 40-odd pageviews), presumably because people are Googling Dave Gorman for some reason.

Extend the scope to the last month and the comfortable winner (with just over 250 pageviews) is this post about my spare room CD shelving from May 2012 - strangely, this one is actually the third-most-visited post of all time on this blog with just over 2000 total pageviews. I presume this must be because it includes a reference to the IKEA Lerberg CD racks that I installed (and which have now apparently been discontinued) - I suppose I can now test this theory by seeing if this post attracts a similar volume of traffic. The next two posts are the book reviews of The Heather Blazing from 2007 and Roadside Picnic from 2012 with 150-odd visits each. Roadside Picnic has been attracting quite a lot of traffic for a few months now (just short of 500 overall) and I've really no idea why.

Overall, the winner by a huge margin is the Alice Roberts post from August 2010, which has attracted a startling 6286 visitors in the four years it's been up, almost certainly all from people looking for scurrilous nudey pictures. The second-placed post with 2871 views is this post from November 2008, whose popularity is probably explained by its being the fifth result in a Google search for "Joanna Lumley plastic anus" - again, reasons which do nobody any credit, least of all me.

Another odd result that I'm at a loss to explain is that last month, October 2014, is the month that's seen the most visitors to this blog, by a considerable margin. October's total of 9762 pageviews is something like half as many again as the previous record-holder, October 2008 with 6532, and that was back when I was blogging a lot more regularly than I am now.

I have no idea why that's happened - it doesn't, for instance, seem to be that any of October's blog posts attracted a huge number of visitors, so if the figures are trustworthy it must be, as it were, back catalogue sales that's doing it. It could of course be something as mundane as Google re-tuning their stats-gathering algorithms and not any real-world change in visitor numbers at all.