At the end of the calendar year WordPress provides its users with a helpful summary sheet on statistics concerning the blog. Please accept this semi-self-congratulatory post with thanks to everyone who has enjoyed our reflections. It is a pleasure to share our lives and thoughts with you; we hope it has been helpful.
- The blog received about 22,000 views in 2011 to equal 64 views per day. I’m not sure if that is a lot in the larger scheme of things, but it is nice to see the increase from 34 in 2010 and 19 in our abbreviated 2009 beginning.
- Most viewers came from the United States, followed by Egypt, and then Australia. Thanks to you all. Topping the list from the other continents were the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Jordan. Unfortunately WordPress did not provide percentages.
- Outside of Facebook and Twitter, the top referring site to our blog was from Milo Flamingo, who also writes about experiences in Egypt. Please click on her link as an expression of our thanks to her readers. Our Twitter account if you wish to follow is @jnjcasper, and we have started a new Facebook page for the blog, which you can ‘like’ by clicking here.
If you would like to review, or catch some posts you may have missed, these were our five most read articles from 2011:
- Attack on St. Mina Church in Imbaba, Cairo – March 8, 2011. Following a disputed story over a Coptic woman who converted to Islam and was kidnapped and held in this church, it was attacked and a neighboring church was burned.
- Emma’s Saliib – February 26, 2010. ‘Saliib’ is the Arabic word for ‘cross’. Our daughter Emma, now in kindergarten, was attending preschool at a Coptic Orthodox Church, and drew a cross on her hand like many Egyptian Christians do. This article gets many references from Google Search looking for ‘Coptic cross on hand’ or the like.
- Reflections on the New Year’s Eve Massacre in Alexandria – January 1, 2011. The nation, Muslims and Christians together, were shocked when an explosion at a church in Alexandria killed twenty-three people. My anniversary article on this event was recently noted by Christianity Today.
- Rafik Habib: On Sharia, State, and Christianity – April 14, 2011. This article is also fueled by Google, as people search for more information about the son of an Egyptian Protestant pastor who has become the vice president in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. Many Copts consider the MB a political enemy, and I had the privilege of interviewing him.
- Egyptian Protests, Day Two – January 26, 2011. If you would like to recap our perspective from the first days of the Egyptian revolution, you can read also thoughts from the 25th and 27th, before the internet was cut and our contact with the world ended. Surely the readership of these articles increased as people checked in out of concern for our wellbeing. For all good wishes and prayers, we thank you.
Just as a possible preview, we may be looking to change the template of the blog, and perhaps remove the ‘wordpress’ part of its address in the days to come. Despite any modifications, we hope to keep sharing what we learn of Egypt, issuing from a sense of belonging that we hope will continue to mark all we write, think, and do. Thanks once more for following along.
