I Didn't Know This About Blogger ~ STATS Feature

I know I'm speaking to a small audience, because all the cool kids use WordPress, not Blogger. I hate WordPress with a passion. Tried it; it was awful. I couldn't find simple formatting buttons or a way to upload images, or....well, it's been so long, I've forgotten all the things I couldn't find. I might have posted twice on it before waving goodbye.

Of course, "cool kids" don't blog at all. They use Substack for recording their thoughts. And those who do use Blogger all seem obsessed with monetization. You'll note that there are no ads on this blog and there never will be. That would be like sticking ads in the middle of my books. Speaking of "not cool".

I started my first blog in 2006. Hey! It's my twenty-year anniversary! Not much has changed with Blogger's interface in those twenty years, except for the features that went away. One used to be able to find other blogs via a discovery tool or by entering a topic in the search bar. There no longer is a search bar or that discovery tool. Google gave up caring. Tonight I clicked "Reading List" on my Blogger dashboard and found posts from only one blog, which indicates that everyone else I once followed has, like Google, given up.  

There is another feature, though, that I either never noticed or completely ignored, and that is "Stats". I've been using Google Analytics to monitor my number of visitors, most popular posts, etc., but Analytics was devised for techies. If you've ever hit the "help" button on the Google Analytics screen, you'll be met with something like this:

"The flux capacitor was designed to deploy non-carbon-based oligarchies within the concentric sphere of high-intensive cognition, which facilitates AQBPL measures in the context of a banana labyrinth, ensuring prohibitive middleware that accounts for an indeterminate measure of fanto-platypus molecules. If this doesn't resolve your issue, please refer to your IT administrator."

I just wanted to know where my readers originate from, but...thanks.

But on Blogger, the stats screen not only shows my overall visitors per day, month, all-time, but it also displays my most read posts, as well as the current stats for my most recent one. Why did I never see this before? 

Not only that, but it does show where my readers originate, without the fanto-platypus molecules and non-carbon-based oligarchs. Not to nitpick, but this is also a Google product, so why can't Analytics display this info more clearly?

It also gives me the locations of visitors (Hi, Netherlands!) as well as operating systems and browsers (don't really care about that, to be honest). I will note that the majority of my readers access this blog via Android, so like me, they're not rich iPhone users. And apparently, lots of people browse with DuckDuckGo. Who'da thought? Firefox is my default browser, with Edge secondary. Chrome if I'm somehow desperate. But I never installed DuckDuckGo or even thought about installing it. I've even gotten visitors from Bing! 

I have to say, I'm loving this statistics page. So much simpler than Google Analytics, and it displays everything nicely color-coded.  

Where have I been the past 20 years? I feel like a dunce. But now that I've discovered this, the hell with Google Analytics. The tech bros can sit around and discuss how to further complicate their explanations. (They do it on purpose, you know.)

Now I think I should go back and re-read my post, "The Problem With ARCs" from 2024, because it apparently really wowed my readers.  😮