A mammoth undertaking

When Chris set up this blog he subscribed to Google Analytics, which allowed him to see some basic statistics about how the blog is viewed. Not at the level of individual people – everything is totally anonymous unless you choose to send a comment – but aggregations and top-level statistics. I can’t actually make use of the full power of Google Analytics, because the account is in his name, and (like so many other things) I don’t know the password. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t at the top of his list of things to tell me before he died. But what I can see on the blog dashboard is often interesting.

It tells me how often pages are viewed (about 30-40 page views per day, over the past month, on average, and even on Christmas Day about a dozen of you checked up on me, which was nice of you!), and who the top referrers are (Frosty Intervals by a wide margin, but also Kevin/Joan’s and Ryan’s blogs usually feature). One stat which I found interesting this week is the record of the top-five search terms that people use to find the blog:  “icyjumbo blog” and “A mammoth undertaking Chris Booth” are both fairly obvious ones which I would expect. But this week a new search term has appeared on the top five list – “icyjumbo pillows” which is leading people to this post about a way of arranging pillows that my Gran learned as a trainee nurse before the second world war.

There was clearly a story behind this spike in interest in an obscure blog page written over 18 months ago. It turns out that my sister has a colleague whose husband is recovering from a fairly significant operation.  He slept pretty badly in hospital, as he couldn’t get comfortable even with the fully-adjustable hospital bed, and his wife was concerned about how he would cope back home in an ordinary bed. So my sister told her about our family’s way of arranging pillows, and said that I’d blogged about it with detailed photographic instructions when Chris had a bad back. She did a search for “icyjumbo pillows”, found the photos, and printed off the page for her colleague. It was subsequently reported back that the colleague’s husband had slept so much better using “the pillows” than he had in hospital, and was really pleased to learn the method. It looks to me as if he’s been recommending it onwards, possibly to other patients at the outpatients clinic, and telling them how to search for it.

That’s really nice to know – that complete strangers are getting a better night’s sleep as a result of a throw-away blog post which has taken on a life of its own since I posted it. My mother is rather annoyed though – she says that if she’d known I was going to post the photos, she’d have ironed the sheets first!