Stephen Harper Diet Update

I'm 80% of the way through my 20-week Stephen Harper Diet plan, and still on track. I've lost 16 pounds in 16 weeks. That sounds pretty good, unless you recall that after 8 weeks I had lost 11 pounds. That means I've barely been staying on target the past 8 weeks, and my rate of weight loss has dropped to half what it was in the early stretch. It's certainly a bit tougher to take off the pounds now, and there have been some significant distractions (like my trip to California and last weekend's annual Rib O Rama festivities). Anyway the important thing is that I haven't had to give Mr Harper any money, and oh yeah, I've lost 16 pounds!

Fat Update

Quick update on my weight-loss campaign: I've lost 11 pounds after 8 weeks, a few pounds ahead of the pound-a-week pace I need to maintain to keep my money out of Stephen Harper's hands. I'm feeling good, and was able to move to the 4th notch on my belt yesterday! Alison brought a 5 pound bag of potatoes out of the kitchen, dropped it on my stomach and said "you've lost 2 of these!". I had been thinking of it more in terms of having lost about 1 cat...

Watching the Odometer Turn

One of the cool things I've been learning about as I've set up this blog is all the data you can collect using Google Analytics. And today was the day that couple of interesting milestones were reached, so I thought it's a good time to blog a bit about who is reading this stuff.

Today this blog surpassed 1,000 visits, as well as 500 unique visitors. That's counting from February 5th, when I hooked up Google Analytics to start measuring the traffic. There were probably only a handful of visitors before then to see the first 2 posts.

Google Analytics provides the following data about my visitors:

• 1002 visits (that works out to 9.1 visits per day since I started, or 59 visits per posting)
  
• 572 unique visitors
• Average time spent on this site per visit: 1 minute, 33 seconds
• 45% of the traffic is direct, 25% comes from Facebook (following links when I post there that I have blogged here), 11% via searches, and the rest comes via links that my friends have put up on their sites or twitter feeds (thank you Chris & Anita, Mike, and most recently Michiel!)
• Readers come from 28 countries! Sounds pretty impressive, until you dig down and find that all the visits from 18 of those countries spent 0 seconds at the site, meaning those were accidental visits of some sort. The real traffic is from Canada (63%), the US (28%) the UK (4%) and whatever country Chris & Anita happen to have their boat docked at (2%)
• 51% of visitors used Firefox as their web browser, 27% Internet Explorer, 13% Safari and 7% Chrome
• 73% used Windows, 17% Macintosh, 7% Linux and 3% iPhone

I don't know if any of that data actually means anything, but I find it cool that it's so easy to track, and thought it was worth sharing.