March on the Crooked Road

In case you missed them, these are the top 5 posts in March:

A Weekend in Bend: I’d love to think it was because I wrote so eloquently, or even because Bend is so cool. But I think it was actually because I tagged a bunch of Bend booster-types who retweeted my link. That’s okay, I’ll take it.

Can You Handel Seattle Opera’s Semele?: I didn’t love this opera as much as many others (I’m kind of a bel canto girl) and I guess this goes to show that reviews don’t have to be gushing to be helpful – or at least interesting.

I Heart the I Heart Reykjavík Blog: Well, it’s true. And if you haven’t read it, you should.

Accountability Widget: This attempt to hold myself publicly accountable for my creative writing goals was surprisingly popular. And poorly timed. I signed up for a month-long freelance writer’s workshop soon after and I’m almost definitely not going to make that deadline. Oops.

Can You Read the Signs?: A reflection on creativity and the writing process. I also mentioned (and then tagged on Twitter) a couple of successful writers who retweeted the link. I think I’m figuring something out about driving traffic to this blog.

I’m Giving Away Small Mercies: This post tied with the one above it. I gave away an advance reader copy of a book as an exercise to learn how to do more with this page. I made it work, but most of what I learned was about the limitations of a WordPress hosted blog. Readers seemed to like it though.

Top Countries:

• The United States (by a lot)
• Canada
• Great Britain

Iceland was way down at number 5. Have I been neglecting my Icelandic friends?

How did you get here?

• Google – Far and away the main referrer was Google search
• Twitter – but of course
• Facebook

Google image search fell well below these, as well as a few referring sites like No Clean Singing, but still sent as many people my way as bing and yahoo searches combined.

I actually started doing this statistics posts as an excuse to laugh at the weird search terms that led people to my site. Google has gotten so thorough at hiding search terms that it’s not very much fun anymore. Only three search terms showed up more than once:

• turandot full opera (um. no. but I did write about Turandot once)
• dancing boys showing their junk (maybe this?)
• seattle opera semele reviews (at least that one makes sense)

I could make out a couple of themes, though:

• 4 searches were related to opera
• 2 were related to Sólstafir
• 3 were about visual arts and artists

Besides the dancing boys, some search terms were interesting:

• googlevillaincom
• asgeir trausti girlfriend
• asgeir trausti boyfriend
• fjogur piano how many pianos (hint: fjogur means four in Icelandic)

Featured Followers:

As search terms become less interesting, I’m beginning to look more closely at followers.

I’ve chosen three followers more or less at random to highlight here, and I hope you’ll go check out their blogs.

• James Revels Composer offers eargasms over on AudioSexxx
• JohnCoyote | poetry, story and real life
• Charlotte Hoather sings soprano, dances ballet, and trains in martial arts, as you do.