And the winner is...

It is obligatory for bloggers to write a year-end retrospective piece. If you don't, you lose your blog license, or they send all the spam comments to you or something bad happens. That's a fact. And, judging from the other blogs I read that retrospective must be a recap of your own blogginess.

So, cutting right to the chase -- the Retired In Austin blog entry that received the most hits this year is:

Monday Meanderings - Sep 20. This blog is rated "PG" 

Followed by:

You can't go home until you pee
We need more cowbell!!
The Adventures of Bob the Dog – the Meat Market Massacre   and
I once dated a girl... 

Google has a lot to do with blog hits. It's amazing what people search for, and these are some of the search keywords have led people to my blog this year:

retired in austin
phone outages austin texas wednesday september 8 2010 
acl fest 2010
breckenridge high school buckaroos
colt and rachel's wedding
jerry gibson breckenridge
robert earl keene  (Hop on your Harley - it's ROT Rally)
splat the cat chuy's (now that's a strange combination)
university of texas cowbell

and interestingly enough - watch band calendars.

Counting the number of visitors is a bit of a challenge. I have a couple of sources, but they don't exactly cover the same periods, so I'm extrapolating some (hey, what's a few thousand hits among friends?). As you would expect, the majority of visitors came from the United States - 1,075 of them. But I also had visitors from:

South Korea (82)
Canada (53)
United Kingdom (27)
Brazil (24)
France (23)
Denmark (19)
Italy (18)
Malta (18)
Plus some others that the site meter seems unable to count unless I pay for the premium $ervice.

Far and away more Windows users (1,646) visited than Mac users (496), but some came calling from iPhones, iPads, Blackberrys and one soul was using Playstation 3 to browse the web. Go figure.

As best as I can tell (since I didn't write it down last year) there have been 3,922 page views in 2010. I can't tell how many individual people that actually is -- it may be only 6 loyal friends clicking more than 650 times  apiece. Thanks, guys. The check is in the mail.

Oh, and Happy New Year!